Jia Xu · Yang Wood Dog

Meaning

Jia Xu plants the tall tree on the Dog’s late-autumn earth, a dry storehouse of Fire, and opens the second of the cycle’s six weeks. The tradition reads steadiness against the season, a straight character that holds its ground as the year turns cold.

Jia over Xu: 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 Dog is loyal, honest and just.

The zodiac reads a Jia Xu year as the Wood Dog’s. The Wood Dog is the most easy-going of the Dogs: honest, warm, cooperative, a friend for life. Its sense of fairness is strong, and it forgives others’ faults more readily than most Dogs.

Its Na Yin, shared with Yi Hai, is Fire on the mountain top (山頭火 shāntóu huǒ): a sound of Fire, heard beside the pillar’s Wood and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1814, 1874, 1934, 1994, 2054, 2114 and 2174, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Dog month of every Jia or Ji year, opened by Cold Dew, as in the solar years 2024 and 2029.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 1 March, 30 April, 29 June, 28 August, 27 October and 26 December.
• As an hour: the Dog’s double hour, 19:00–21:00, of Jia and Ji days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Jia, sitting on Xu, the partner palace: Xu holds Wu, Xin and Ding, Jia’s Indirect Wealth, Direct Officer and Hurting Officer, and Jia stands at its Nurture 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-inu, gapsul and Giáp Tuất, with each language’s readings of 甲 and 戌.

How Ulune calculates it

Jia Xu is the 11th of the sixty pillars: the 1st of the ten stems over the 11th 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 Xu opens the ten-day week from Jia Xu to Gui Wei, whose stems meet the branches from Xu to Wei and leave out Shen and You: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 6th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences