Ji Chou · Yin Earth Ox

Meaning

Ji Chou is the field on the Ox’s winter earth, a stem on its own phase, and Chou also stores Water and Metal under the frost. The tradition reads steadiness to the bone, slow and lasting work, and more held in reserve than shows.

Ji over Chou: yin Earth over yin Earth, a stem standing on its own phase.

Ji, Yin Earth, is the field and the garden soil: fertile, receptive, nourishing what is planted in it. The Ox is patient, steady and strong.

The zodiac reads a Ji Chou year as the Earth Ox’s. The Earth Ox is the Ox twice over: calm, methodical, reliable to the bone. It builds slowly and lastingly, and others lean on it; it does well to let in some change and some play.

Its Na Yin, shared with Wu Zi, is Fire of the thunderbolt (霹靂火 pīlì huǒ): a sound of Fire, heard beside the pillar’s Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1829, 1889, 1949, 2009, 2069, 2129 and 2189, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Ox month of every Yi or Geng year, opened by Minor Cold, as in the solar years 2020 and 2025.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 15 January, 16 March, 15 May, 14 July, 12 September and 11 November.
• As an hour: the Ox’s double hour, 01:00–03:00, of Bing and Xin days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ji, sitting on Chou, the partner palace: Chou holds Ji, Gui and Xin, Ji’s Companion, Indirect Wealth and Eating God, and Ji stands at its Storehouse 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 tsuchinoto-ushi, gichuk and Kỷ Sửu, with each language’s readings of 己 and 丑.

How Ulune calculates it

Ji Chou is the 26th of the sixty pillars: the 6th 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).

Ji Chou belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Shen to Gui Si, whose stems meet the branches from Shen to Si and leave out Wu and Wei: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 13th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences