Ji Hai · Yin Earth Pig

Meaning

Ji Hai lays the garden soil along the Pig’s early winter water, Earth gently banking the phase it controls. The tradition reads patience and warmth at home, and a little ambition to widen its world.

Ji over Hai: yin Earth over yin Water, a stem that controls its branch, as Earth controls Water.

Ji, Yin Earth, is the field and the garden soil: fertile, receptive, nourishing what is planted in it. The Pig is generous, sincere and good-natured.

The zodiac reads a Ji Hai year as the Earth Pig’s. The Earth Pig is the most patient of the Pigs: kind, steady, fond of home and of good things. It makes life comfortable for everyone around it, and a little ambition widens its world.

Its Na Yin, shared with Wu Xu, is Wood of the plain (平地木 píngdì mù): a sound of Wood, heard beside the pillar’s Earth and Water.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1839, 1899, 1959, 2019, 2079, 2139 and 2199, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Pig month of every Bing or Xin year, opened by Start of Winter, as in the solar years 2021 and 2026.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 25 January, 26 March, 25 May, 24 July, 22 September and 21 November.
• As an hour: the Pig’s double hour, 21:00–23:00, of Bing and Xin days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ji, sitting on Hai, the partner palace: Hai holds Ren and Jia, Ji’s Direct Wealth and Direct Officer, and Ji stands at its Conception 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-i, gihae and Kỷ Hợi, with each language’s readings of 己 and 亥.

How Ulune calculates it

Ji Hai is the 36th of the sixty pillars: the 6th of the ten stems over the 12th 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 Hai belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Wu to Gui Mao, whose stems meet the branches from Wu to Mao and leave out Chen and Si: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 18th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences