Jia Shen · Yang Wood Monkey

Meaning

Jia Shen stands the tall tree in the Monkey’s autumn Metal, which prunes it, though Shen also holds the Water that feeds a tree; it opens the cycle’s third week. The tradition reads an inventive spirit tested by circumstances, and learning from them.

Jia over Shen: yang Wood over yang Metal, a stem its branch controls, as Metal controls Wood.

Jia, Yang Wood, is the tall tree: upright, growing towards the light, steady in its roots. The Monkey is clever, playful and inventive.

The zodiac reads a Jia Shen year as the Wood Monkey’s. The Wood Monkey is the inventive Monkey: curious, enterprising, eager to try every new idea. Its enthusiasm brings others along, and patience turns its sparks into lasting work.

Its Na Yin, shared with Yi You, is Water from the spring (泉中水 quánzhōng shuǐ): a sound of Water, heard beside the pillar’s Wood and Metal.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1824, 1884, 1944, 2004, 2064, 2124 and 2184, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Monkey month of every Yi or Geng year, opened by Start of Autumn, as in the solar years 2020 and 2025.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 10 January, 11 March, 10 May, 9 July, 7 September and 6 November.
• As an hour: the Monkey’s double hour, 15:00–17:00, of Yi and Geng days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Jia, sitting on Shen, the partner palace: Shen holds Geng, Ren and Wu, Jia’s Seven Killings, Indirect Resource and Indirect Wealth, and Jia stands at its Pause 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-saru, gapsin and Giáp Thân, with each language’s readings of 甲 and 申.

How Ulune calculates it

Jia Shen is the 21st of the sixty pillars: the 1st of the ten stems over the 9th 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 Shen opens 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 11th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences