Na Yin

Meaning

The Na Yin, 納音 nàyīn, “received sound”, give each two pillars of the sixty-cycle in a row one of thirty images, each with its phase: Jia Zi and Yi Chou are Metal in the sea, Bing Yin and Ding Mao Fire in the furnace, Wu Chen and Ji Si Wood of the great forest, and so on to Ren Xu and Gui Hai, Water of the great sea. A pillar thus has three voices: its stem, its branch, and the sound the two make together, which need not be the phase of either.

The images are pictures of a phase in a setting, and the tradition reads them so: Metal in the sea is gold not yet brought up, Metal of the sword’s edge is metal at its sharpest; Fire in the furnace is fire at work, Fire of the lamp a small, steady light. Each is a nuance of its phase, more concrete than the phase alone, and the older books built whole portraits on them.

For BaZi’s Zi Ping school the Na Yin are an older layer, kept as a nuance beside the stems and branches rather than at the centre; for popular almanacs, and for much of Vietnamese and Chinese folk practice, the Na Yin of the birth year is still a person’s own element, “a Sea Metal person”. Ulune shows them as a tone heard beside the pillar, never as a verdict.

In practice

• On BaZi’s board, each pillar shows its Na Yin under its column, and its reading says what that phase is to the Day Master, its own, its output, its wealth, its power or its resource.
• 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.
• Fifteen and fifteen: the phases of the thirty run in a sequence of fifteen, Metal, Fire, Wood, Earth, Metal, Fire, Water, Earth, Metal, Wood, Water, Earth, Fire, Wood, Water, and then once more, so that pillars thirty apart, with the same stems and opposite branches, share a phase.
• Each phase sounds six times: six Metals, from the sea to the hairpins, six Fires, from the furnace to the sky, six Woods, six Earths and six Waters.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam they are nacchin, nabeum and nạp âm; in Vietnam the Na Yin of the birth year, a person’s mệnh, is among the best-known ideas of the whole tradition.
• In Western thought the nearest idea is the harmony of the spheres, the old belief, from Pythagoras to Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi of 1619, that the order of the heavens can be heard as music: a cosmos measured in sounds rather than in places.

Origin and history

The name comes from music. The sixty pillars were matched to the five notes and the twelve pitch pipes, sixty sounds in all, and each pair of pillars “received” a note, hence a phase; Shen Kuo’s Mengxi Bitan, in 1088, explains the order of the thirty from the way the pitch pipes generate one another. A second explanation is arithmetic: Yang Xiong’s Taixuan Jing, around AD 2, gives each stem and branch a number, and Xiao Ji’s Wuxing Dayi, around 600, shows how the numbers of four characters give their Na Yin’s phase. The Tang dynasty’s “three lives” reading made the year’s Na Yin a person’s own element; the Song dynasty Zi Ping school moved the centre to the Day Master, and Wan Minying’s San Ming Tong Hui, in the 16th century, gathered the old images of the thirty into the long portraits later books still quote.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads a pillar’s Na Yin from the classical table of thirty, one for each two pillars in the cycle’s order: the place of the pillar, halved and rounded down. The arithmetic gives the same thirty, and the encyclopedia shows it on each page: add the numbers of the four characters, take the sum from 49, and read the last digit, 1 or 6 Water, 2 or 7 Fire, 3 or 8 Wood, 4 or 9 Metal, 5 or 0 Earth; the Na Yin is the phase that one produces. For Jia Zi and Yi Chou, 9 + 9 + 8 + 8 = 34, 49 − 34 = 15, 5 is Earth, and Earth produces Metal: Metal in the sea.

Correspondences