Geng Chen · Yang Metal Dragon

Meaning

Geng Chen sets the ore in the Dragon’s damp spring earth, which produces it and keeps Water in store. The tradition reads a powerful, principled will with deep reserves, at its best when its strength serves others too.

Geng over Chen: yang Metal over yang Earth, a stem its branch produces, as Earth produces Metal.

Geng, Yang Metal, is the raw ore and the axe: strong, decisive, made sharper by the forge. The Dragon, the only creature of legend among the twelve, stands for vitality and good fortune.

The zodiac reads a Geng Chen year as the Metal Dragon’s. The Metal Dragon is strong and uncompromising: principled, tireless, sure of its course. It achieves much, and learns that others may have good reasons of their own.

Its Na Yin, shared with Xin Si, is Metal of white wax (白蠟金 báilà jīn): a sound of Metal, heard beside the pillar’s Metal and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1820, 1880, 1940, 2000, 2060, 2120 and 2180, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Dragon month of every Yi or Geng year, opened by Clear and Bright, as in the solar years 2020 and 2025.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 6 January, 7 March, 6 May, 5 July, 3 September and 2 November.
• As an hour: the Dragon’s double hour, 07:00–09:00, of Yi and Geng days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Geng, sitting on Chen, the partner palace: Chen holds Wu, Yi and Gui, Geng’s Indirect Resource, Direct Wealth and Hurting Officer, and Geng stands at its Nurture stage there.
• As a luck pillar or a year, it brings each Day Master the god of its stem and the god of its branch’s main qi: the Correspondences below give them for all ten.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the same pillar is kanoe-tatsu, gyeongjin and Canh Thìn, with each language’s readings of 庚 and 辰.

How Ulune calculates it

Geng Chen is the 17th of the sixty pillars: the 7th of the ten stems over the 5th of the twelve branches, which the cycle moves on one step together, so that a stem only ever meets the branches of its polarity. Ulune counts a year’s pillar from Lichun, 1984 being Jia Zi; a month’s twelve a year through the cycle, from Bing Yin in the Tiger month of 1984 (the rule of the five tigers); a day’s by the count of days, 1 January 2000 being Wu Wu; an hour’s twelve a day (the rule of the five rats).

Geng Chen belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Xu to Gui Wei, whose stems meet the branches from Xu to Wei and leave out Shen and You: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 9th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences