Ji You · Yin Earth Rooster

Meaning

Ji You is the soil that yields the Rooster’s pure Metal, Earth giving itself to what it produces, at the stage where its own yin phase is born. The tradition reads thoroughness and precision, careful work that leaves nothing to chance.

Ji over You: yin Earth over yin Metal, a stem that produces its branch, as Earth produces Metal.

Ji, Yin Earth, is the field and the garden soil: fertile, receptive, nourishing what is planted in it. The Rooster is observant, frank and hard-working.

The zodiac reads a Ji You year as the Earth Rooster’s. The Earth Rooster is the most thorough of the Roosters: practical, precise, a careful worker who leaves nothing to chance. It is a pillar for others, and learns to loosen its grip.

Its Na Yin, shared with Wu Shen, is Earth of the great road (大驛土 dàyì tǔ): a sound of Earth, heard beside the pillar’s Earth and Metal.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1849, 1909, 1969, 2029, 2089 and 2149, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Rooster month of every Ding or Ren year, opened by White Dew, as in the solar years 2022 and 2027.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 4 February, 5 April, 4 June, 3 August, 2 October and 1 December.
• As an hour: the Rooster’s double hour, 17:00–19:00, of Ding and Ren days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ji, sitting on You, the partner palace: You holds Xin, Ji’s Eating God, and Ji stands at its Birth 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-tori, giyu and Kỷ Dậu, with each language’s readings of 己 and 酉.

How Ulune calculates it

Ji You is the 46th of the sixty pillars: the 6th 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).

Ji You belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Chen to Gui Chou, whose stems meet the branches from Chen to Chou and leave out Yin and Mao: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 23rd of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences