Ji Mao · Yin Earth Rabbit

Meaning

Ji Mao is the garden soil of mid-spring, crowded with the Rabbit’s young wood. The ground gives more than it keeps, and the tradition reads care and generosity that do well to keep some strength for themselves.

Ji over Mao: yin Earth over yin Wood, a stem its branch controls, as Wood controls Earth.

Ji, Yin Earth, is the field and the garden soil: fertile, receptive, nourishing what is planted in it. The Rabbit is gentle, refined and tactful.

The zodiac reads a Ji Mao year as the Earth Rabbit’s. The Earth Rabbit is the most grounded of the Rabbits: sensible, steady, attached to home and to a few close people. Wary of sudden change, it gives others a feeling of safety.

Its Na Yin, shared with Wu Yin, is Earth on the city wall (城頭土 chéngtóu tǔ): a sound of Earth, heard beside the pillar’s Earth and Wood.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1819, 1879, 1939, 1999, 2059, 2119 and 2179, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Rabbit month of every Yi or Geng year, opened by Awakening of Insects, as in the solar years 2020 and 2025.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 5 January, 6 March, 5 May, 4 July, 2 September, 1 November and 31 December.
• As an hour: the Rabbit’s double hour, 05:00–07:00, of Yi and Geng days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ji, sitting on Mao, the partner palace: Mao holds Yi, Ji’s Seven Killings, and Ji 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 tsuchinoto-u, gimyo and Kỷ Mão, with each language’s readings of 己 and 卯.

How Ulune calculates it

Ji Mao is the 16th of the sixty pillars: the 6th of the ten stems over the 4th 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 Mao belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Xu to Gui Wei, whose stems meet the branches from Xu to Wei and leave out Shen and You: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 8th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences