Jia Chen · Yang Wood Dragon

Meaning

Jia Chen roots the tall tree in the Dragon’s damp earth, which stores Water for it and keeps a little Wood beside it, and opens the cycle’s fifth week. The tradition reads a large, creative vision with resources to draw on.

Jia over Chen: yang Wood over yang Earth, a stem that controls its branch, as Wood controls Earth.

Jia, Yang Wood, is the tall tree: upright, growing towards the light, steady in its roots. The Dragon, the only creature of legend among the twelve, stands for vitality and good fortune.

The zodiac reads a Jia Chen year as the Wood Dragon’s. The Wood Dragon is the creative Dragon: imaginative, generous, keen to build something new and to bring others into it. Its vision is large, and it gains by finishing as boldly as it begins.

Its Na Yin, shared with Yi Si, is Fire of the lamp (覆燈火 fùdēng huǒ): a sound of Fire, heard beside the pillar’s Wood and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1844, 1904, 1964, 2024, 2084 and 2144, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Dragon month of every Ding or Ren year, opened by Clear and Bright, as in the solar years 2022 and 2027.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 30 January, 31 March, 30 May, 29 July, 27 September and 26 November.
• As an hour: the Dragon’s double hour, 07:00–09:00, of Ding and Ren days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Jia, sitting on Chen, the partner palace: Chen holds Wu, Yi and Gui, Jia’s Indirect Wealth, Rob Wealth and Direct Resource, and Jia stands at its Decline 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 kinoe-tatsu, gapjin and Giáp Thìn, with each language’s readings of 甲 and 辰.

How Ulune calculates it

Jia Chen is the 41st of the sixty pillars: the 1st of the ten stems over the 5th 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).

Jia Chen opens 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 21st of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences