Gui You · Yin Water Rooster

Meaning

Gui You sets the dew on the Rooster’s pure Metal in mid-autumn, a water its branch produces without fail. The tradition reads clarity and discretion, a fine mind, careful with words, that sees the details others miss.

Gui over You: yin Water over yin Metal, a stem its branch produces, as Metal produces Water.

Gui, Yin Water, is the rain and the dew: gentle, everywhere, giving life quietly. The Rooster is observant, frank and hard-working.

The zodiac reads a Gui You year as the Water Rooster’s. The Water Rooster is the most diplomatic of the Roosters: perceptive, articulate, attentive to people as much as to tasks. Its clear mind serves others well.

Its Na Yin, shared with Ren Shen, is Metal of the sword’s edge (劍鋒金 jiànfēng jīn): a sound of Metal, heard beside the pillar’s Water and Metal.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1813, 1873, 1933, 1993, 2053, 2113 and 2173, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Rooster month of every Jia or Ji year, opened by White Dew, as in the solar years 2024 and 2029.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 28 February, 29 April, 28 June, 27 August, 26 October and 25 December.
• As an hour: the Rooster’s double hour, 17:00–19:00, of Jia and Ji days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Gui, sitting on You, the partner palace: You holds Xin, Gui’s Indirect Resource, and Gui stands at its Retreat 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-tori, gyeyu and Quý Dậu, with each language’s readings of 癸 and 酉.

How Ulune calculates it

Gui You is the 10th of the sixty pillars: the 10th of the ten stems over the 10th 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 You belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Zi to Gui You, whose stems meet the branches from Zi to You and leave out Xu and Hai: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 5th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences