Metal in the sea

Meaning

Metal in the sea is gold lying deep under the water, real but out of sight. The old books read it as worth that does not show at first, and that comes up with time, or with a hand that knows where to look.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Jia Zi and Yi Chou, the 1st of the thirty: a sound of Metal. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Metal sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Metal of the sword’s edge, Metal of white wax, Metal in the sand, Gold leaf metal and Metal of hairpins and bracelets.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Jia Zi, the Yang Wood Rat, and Yi Chou, the Yin Wood Ox: a Metal 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: 1804–1805, 1864–1865, 1924–1925, 1984–1985, 2044–2045, 2104–2105 and 2164–2165, 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 1st and the 2nd, Jia Zi and Yi Chou. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 甲子 and 乙丑, 9 + 9 + 8 + 8 = 34; 49 − 34 = 15, whose 5 gives Earth, and Earth produces Metal, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences