Jia · Yang Wood

Meaning

Jia is the first of the ten Heavenly Stems and the yang side of Wood: growth as it first breaks out, upright and sure of its direction. The character 甲 is a husk or a shell, and the Han historians read the stem as the moment growing things split their husks and come out; BaZi’s classics see in it a great tree, and the Di Tian Sui opens its verses with it: “Jia wood reaches up to heaven.”

Its image gives its qualities. A tall tree grows slowly and keeps growing; it stands its ground, shelters what lives beneath it and gives its timber to others. Jia is read as principle and steadiness, the drive to begin and to build, a protective and generous strength, a straightness that makes it trustworthy. Its difficulty is the same straightness from the other side: a trunk does not bend, and Jia may hold to its course after the wind has changed, or find it hard to ask for help.

A tree needs the rest of the landscape, and the tradition reads Jia through what it needs. The Di Tian Sui says it wants Fire to come into its own, the warmth of the sun and a use for its wood, and that on moist ground under a mild sky it stands for a thousand years; with too much Water it drifts, with too much Metal it is cut back. These are read as what helps Jia grow, never as threats: a chart is a landscape, and the stem is one tree in it.

In practice

• As the Day Master, Jia finds its resources in Water, Ren and Gui, and its peers in Wood, Yi being its Rob Wealth. Fire is its output, Bing its Eating God and Ding its Hurting Officer; Earth is its wealth, Wu indirect and Ji direct; Metal is the power that shapes it, Geng its Seven Killings and Xin its Direct Officer.
• Its roots: Jia is the main qi of Yin, the Tiger, and hidden in Hai, the Pig; a Jia Day Master with one of them in the chart is said to be rooted. In the twelve life stages it is born in Hai, prospers in Yin and stands at its peak in Mao, the heart of spring.
• Its partners: Jia combines with Ji, yin Earth, its Direct Wealth, a pair that leans towards Earth; it clashes with Geng, yang Metal, the axe against the tree.
• In time: the years ending in 4 are Jia years, counted from Lichun: 2024 was the Wood Dragon’s, 2034 will be the Wood Tiger’s. A Jia or Ji year opens with a Bing-Yin month, and a Jia or Ji day with a Jia-Zi hour.
• In Feng Shui, Jia is a mountain of the luopan, the first of the east, from 67.5° to 82.5°, and a yang one for the Flying Stars.

Across traditions

• In Japan 甲 is read kinoe, “elder brother of wood”; in Korea gap, in Vietnam Giáp. Kōshien, the stadium of Japan’s school baseball championships, is named after the Jia-Zi year in which it opened, 1924.
• As a first letter, Jia is the A of Chinese lists: Party A of a contract (甲方), a first-rate grade, and in chemistry a single carbon atom, 甲烷 jiǎwán, methane.
• In Western astrology, nothing counts like a stem, but the same idea of a first, outward push belongs to Aries, the sign that opens the zodiac at the spring equinox.

Origin and history

On the oracle bones of the Shang dynasty 甲 is written as a simple cross; it names the first day of the ten-day week, and the royal ancestors honoured on Jia days include Shang Jia, with whom the cycle of sacrifices began, and Zu Jia, a son of Wu Ding. The Han historians explained the name by the husk: Sima Qian says that in Jia “the ten thousand things split their husks and come out”, Ban Gu that they leave their husks in Jia, and Xu Shen’s dictionary (c. 100) reads the character as a sprout still wearing its seed case, the first stir of yang in the east.

The image of the tree comes from BaZi’s own classics. The Yuanhai Ziping, compiled in the Song dynasty, sets out the stems’ relations to the Day Master; the Di Tian Sui gives Jia its verse, the tree that reaches heaven and needs Fire, and Ren Tieqiao’s commentary of the Qing dynasty reads it as a great trunk that thrives on warmth and moisture and suffers from neither water nor metal in excess. Modern teachers keep the picture: the oak, the pine, the beam of a house.

How Ulune calculates it

Jia is the stem of six of the sixty pillars, Jia-Zi, Jia-Xu, Jia-Shen, Jia-Wu, Jia-Chen and Jia-Yin, each joining it to a yang branch. Ulune finds it in a chart the way it finds every stem: the year from Lichun, the month by the five tigers, the day by the count of days, the hour by the five rats. In BaZi’s balance a visible Jia counts one point of Wood, a hidden one its weight (0.6 in Yin, 0.3 in Hai, twice in the month branch). For a Jia Day Master Ulune counts the life stages forward from Hai, as for every yang stem, and finds its symbolic stars by the classical verses: the Nobleman in Chou and Wei, the Academic star in Si, the Prosperity star in Yin and the Sword Edge in Mao. The pages draw Jia in Wood’s green.

Correspondences