Fire of the lamp

Meaning

Fire of the lamp is the flame under its shade that lights a room at night, the light of the scholar’s desk. The tradition reads a steady, sheltered intelligence that keeps burning when the larger lights have gone out.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Jia Chen and Yi Si, the 21st of the thirty: a sound of Fire. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Fire sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Fire in the furnace, Fire on the mountain top, Fire of the thunderbolt, Fire at the foot of the mountain and Fire in the sky.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Jia Chen, the Yang Wood Dragon, and Yi Si, the Yin Wood Snake: a Fire sound for two Wood stems, the Na Yin being a layer of its own beside the stem and the branch.
• On BaZi’s board, each pillar shows its Na Yin under its column, and its reading says what its phase is to the Day Master: the Correspondences below give it for all five phases.
• Its years, two in a row, each from Lichun: 1844–1845, 1904–1905, 1964–1965, 2024–2025, 2084–2085 and 2144–2145, in the 1800–2200 table.
• In the zodiac’s table, each of the four places, the year, the month, the day and the hour, gives the Na Yin of its pillar.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads a pillar’s Na Yin from the classical table of thirty (names.ts), one for each two pillars in the cycle’s order: this one for the 41st and the 42nd, Jia Chen and Yi Si. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 甲辰 and 乙巳, 9 + 5 + 8 + 4 = 26; 49 − 26 = 23, whose 3 gives Wood, and Wood produces Fire, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences