Ox

Meaning

The Ox is the second of the twelve animals, the animal of the branch Chou: Earth, yin, the cold ground of the last month of winter and the small hours before dawn. In the legend of the Great Race it was the hardest worker and would have arrived first, had the Rat not ridden on its back; the story suits it, for the tradition sees the Ox as the one who does the work and does not mind who takes the credit.

Ulune’s portrait reads it as patient, steady and strong: it advances step by step and rarely turns back, honest and hard-working, the one others rely on when things get difficult. Its gifts are perseverance, reliability, calm and a sense of duty. What the tradition asks it to watch is the weight of its steadiness: stubbornness, and a slowness to accept change or to ask for help.

Its branch adds depth to the portrait. Chou is a storehouse, the frozen field that keeps the seed safe until spring, and the Ox is read as the keeper of what lasts: skills learned slowly, promises kept, a quiet confidence that its time will come. China’s farmers depended on it, and its image is that of honest work that feeds everyone.

In practice

• As the year animal, the Ox is how others see a person and the generation they share: those born from Lichun 2021 to Lichun 2022 are Metal Oxen, from Lichun 2033 Water Oxen.
• As the inner, true and secret animal: as the month animal, Ulune reads the Ox’s patience inside, growing slowly and surely; as the day animal, a partner loyal and dependable, steady rather than showy, slow to trust and then trusting for good; as the hour animal, a quiet worker who finds peace in effort and routine and needs no applause.
• The five Oxen: the Wood Ox cooperates and keeps its word, the Fire Ox drives a project to its end, the Earth Ox is the Ox twice over, methodical to the bone, the Metal Ox has a will of iron, the Water Ox reaches its goals by persistence rather than force. Wood came in 1985, Fire in 1997, Earth in 2009, Metal in 2021, and Water comes in 2033.
• Its relations: the Ox’s allies are the Snake and the Rooster, its trine of Metal; its partner in harmony is the Rat. It clashes with the Goat, harms the Horse, belongs to the punishment of power with the Dog and the Goat, and forms a destruction with the Dragon.
• In time: the Ox’s own years return every twelve, 2021 and 2033; a Goat year such as 2027 is its clash year, a year for changes chosen rather than suffered; the Rat, Snake and Rooster years are its friendly ones.

Across traditions

• In Japan the Ox is ushi; in Korea so; in Vietnam the water buffalo, trâu, of the branch Sửu, the animal of the rice fields.
• In Chinese custom the Spring Ox opened the year: at Lichun, officials struck a clay ox with willow switches to wake the spring, and almanacs still print the Spring Ox with its herdboy. The legend of the Herdboy and the Weaver Girl, separated by the Milky Way and reunited once a year at Qixi, gives the ox a gentle role too.
• In Zen, the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures of the 12th century draw the search for the self as a herdsman finding, taming and riding home an ox; and Laozi is said to have left China for the west riding an ox. Western astrology’s Taurus, the bull, shares the Ox’s patience and its love of the earth, though it rules late spring.

Origin and history

The Ox is the animal of Chou in Wang Chong’s Lunheng, in the 1st century, which says that Chou and Wei are Earth, Chou’s creature the ox and Wei’s the goat. The ox had long been at the heart of Chinese ritual and farming: the greatest sacrifices offered an ox, with a sheep and a pig, and the clay Spring Ox of Lichun goes back at least to the Han dynasty. Its place second in the cycle, right after the Rat with whom it shares the harmony of Zi and Chou, was explained by the race and by the hour: the small hours of Chou are when oxen chew the cud before the day’s work.

BaZi’s classics read Chou rather than the Ox, a storehouse of Metal with Water and Earth inside it. The Ox’s portrait as it is known now, the patient worker, steady and dependable, is that of popular books of the 20th century in Chinese, English and French, such as Theodora Lau’s Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes (1979).

How Ulune calculates it

The Ox is the branch Chou: a year, month, day or hour whose pillar’s branch is Chou is an Ox. Ulune counts the Ox year from Lichun, as BaZi and Feng Shui do, and gives the other answer when Chinese New Year would differ; the Ox month runs from Xiaohan, about 6 January, to Lichun, and still belongs to the year before; the Ox hour runs from 01:00 to 03:00 on true solar time. On Ulune’s wheel the Ox stands next to the Rat, a twelfth of a turn clockwise from the top. Its portraits, with its five phases and its places, are Ulune’s own texts, written from what popular books commonly say.

Correspondences