Earth by the roadside

Meaning

Earth by the roadside is the ground along the way, trodden by every traveller and planted where it can be. The tradition reads modesty and usefulness, a ground that serves many people without asking to be noticed.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Geng Wu and Xin Wei, the 4th of the thirty: a sound of Earth. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Earth sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Earth on the city wall, Earth on the roof, Earth on the wall, Earth of the great road and Earth in the sand.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Geng Wu, the Yang Metal Horse, and Xin Wei, the Yin Metal Goat: a Earth sound for two Metal 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: 1810–1811, 1870–1871, 1930–1931, 1990–1991, 2050–2051, 2110–2111 and 2170–2171, 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 7th and the 8th, Geng Wu and Xin Wei. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 庚午 and 辛未, 8 + 9 + 7 + 8 = 32; 49 − 32 = 17, whose 7 gives Fire, and Fire produces Earth, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences