Fire in the furnace

Meaning

Fire in the furnace is fire contained and put to use: the forge, the kiln, the kitchen stove. The tradition reads energy that transforms what it holds, strongest when it is fed and given its walls.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Bing Yin and Ding Mao, the 2nd of the thirty: a sound of Fire. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Fire sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Fire on the mountain top, Fire of the thunderbolt, Fire at the foot of the mountain, Fire of the lamp and Fire in the sky.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Bing Yin, the Yang Fire Tiger, and Ding Mao, the Yin Fire Rabbit: a Fire 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: 1806–1807, 1866–1867, 1926–1927, 1986–1987, 2046–2047, 2106–2107 and 2166–2167, 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 3rd and the 4th, Bing Yin and Ding Mao. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 丙寅 and 丁卯, 7 + 7 + 6 + 6 = 26; 49 − 26 = 23, whose 3 gives Wood, and Wood produces Fire, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences