Gui Chou · Yin Water Ox

Meaning

Gui Chou lets the late-winter rain sink into the Ox’s cold earth, which keeps a root of Water for it. The tradition reads patience and persistence, goals reached by steady soaking rather than by force.

Gui over Chou: yin Water over yin Earth, a stem its branch controls, as Earth controls Water.

Gui, Yin Water, is the rain and the dew: gentle, everywhere, giving life quietly. The Ox is patient, steady and strong.

The zodiac reads a Gui Chou year as the Water Ox’s. The Water Ox is the most supple of the Oxen: patient, thoughtful, a good listener who reaches its goals by persistence rather than force. Its calm is a refuge for others.

Its Na Yin, shared with Ren Zi, is Mulberry wood (桑柘木 sāngzhè mù): a sound of Wood, heard beside the pillar’s Water and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1853, 1913, 1973, 2033, 2093 and 2153, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Ox month of every Ding or Ren year, opened by Minor Cold, as in the solar years 2022 and 2027.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 8 February, 9 April, 8 June, 7 August, 6 October and 5 December.
• As an hour: the Ox’s double hour, 01:00–03:00, of Wu and Gui days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Gui, sitting on Chou, the partner palace: Chou holds Ji, Gui and Xin, Gui’s Seven Killings, Companion and Indirect Resource, and Gui stands at its Crown 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 mizunoto-ushi, gyechuk and Quý Sửu, with each language’s readings of 癸 and 丑.

How Ulune calculates it

Gui Chou is the 50th of the sixty pillars: the 10th of the ten stems over the 2nd 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).

Gui Chou belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Chen to Gui Chou, whose stems meet the branches from Chen to Chou and leave out Yin and Mao: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 25th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences