Jia Wu · Yang Wood Horse

Meaning

Jia Wu stands the tall tree in the Horse’s midsummer fire, Wood feeding the phase it produces, and opens the cycle’s fourth week, thirty steps from Jia Zi. The tradition reads generosity and warmth, energy given freely, and the wisdom of choosing where to give it.

Jia over Wu: yang Wood over yang Fire, a stem that produces its branch, as Wood produces Fire.

Jia, Yang Wood, is the tall tree: upright, growing towards the light, steady in its roots. The Horse is free, lively and warm.

The zodiac reads a Jia Wu year as the Wood Horse’s. The Wood Horse is the friendliest of the Horses: cheerful, cooperative, curious about everything and everyone. Its energy is generous, and it does well to pick a few roads and follow them far.

Its Na Yin, shared with Yi Wei, is Metal in the sand (沙中金 shāzhōng jīn): a sound of Metal, heard beside the pillar’s Wood and Fire.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1834, 1894, 1954, 2014, 2074, 2134 and 2194, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Horse month of every Bing or Xin year, opened by Grain in Ear, as in the solar years 2021 and 2026.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 20 January, 21 March, 20 May, 19 July, 17 September and 16 November.
• As an hour: the Horse’s double hour, 11:00–13:00, of Bing and Xin days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Jia, sitting on Wu, the partner palace: Wu holds Ding and Ji, Jia’s Hurting Officer and Direct Wealth, and Jia stands at its Rest 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-uma, gap-o and Giáp Ngọ, with each language’s readings of 甲 and 午.

How Ulune calculates it

Jia Wu is the 31st of the sixty pillars: the 1st of the ten stems over the 7th 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 Wu opens the ten-day week from Jia Wu to Gui Mao, whose stems meet the branches from Wu to Mao and leave out Chen and Si: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 16th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences