Water in the ravine

Meaning

Water in the ravine is the stream that runs between rocks at the bottom of a gully, cold and clear. The tradition reads a quick, clean intelligence that finds its way through narrow places.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Bing Zi and Ding Chou, the 7th of the thirty: a sound of Water. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Water sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Water from the spring, Long-flowing water, Water of the Milky Way, Water of the great stream and Water of the great sea.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Bing Zi, the Yang Fire Rat, and Ding Chou, the Yin Fire Ox: a Water sound for two Fire 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: 1816–1817, 1876–1877, 1936–1937, 1996–1997, 2056–2057, 2116–2117 and 2176–2177, 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 13th and the 14th, Bing Zi and Ding Chou. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 丙子 and 丁丑, 7 + 9 + 6 + 8 = 30; 49 − 30 = 19, whose 9 gives Metal, and Metal produces Water, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences