Metal of the sword’s edge

Meaning

Metal of the sword’s edge is metal brought to its finest, the honed line of a blade. The tradition reads decision and clarity of purpose, a sharpness at its best when good judgement keeps it in its sheath until it is needed.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Ren Shen and Gui You, the 5th of the thirty: a sound of Metal. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Metal sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Metal in the sea, Metal of white wax, Metal in the sand, Gold leaf metal and Metal of hairpins and bracelets.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Ren Shen, the Yang Water Monkey, and Gui You, the Yin Water Rooster: a Metal sound for two Water stems, the Na Yin being a layer of its own beside the stem and the branch.
• On BaZi’s board, each pillar shows its Na Yin under its column, and its reading says what its phase is to the Day Master: the Correspondences below give it for all five phases.
• Its years, two in a row, each from Lichun: 1812–1813, 1872–1873, 1932–1933, 1992–1993, 2052–2053, 2112–2113 and 2172–2173, in the 1800–2200 table.
• In the zodiac’s table, each of the four places, the year, the month, the day and the hour, gives the Na Yin of its pillar.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads a pillar’s Na Yin from the classical table of thirty (names.ts), one for each two pillars in the cycle’s order: this one for the 9th and the 10th, Ren Shen and Gui You. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 壬申 and 癸酉, 6 + 7 + 5 + 6 = 24; 49 − 24 = 25, whose 5 gives Earth, and Earth produces Metal, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences