Wood of the plain

Meaning

Wood of the plain is the young tree of the open flatlands, exposed to every wind and free to grow in any direction. The tradition reads openness and promise, a growth that thrives with space, shelter and patience.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Wu Xu and Ji Hai, the 18th of the thirty: a sound of Wood. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Wood sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Wood of the great forest, Willow wood, Pine and cypress wood, Mulberry wood and Pomegranate wood.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Wu Xu, the Yang Earth Dog, and Ji Hai, the Yin Earth Pig: a Wood sound for two Earth 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: 1838–1839, 1898–1899, 1958–1959, 2018–2019, 2078–2079, 2138–2139 and 2198–2199, 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 35th and the 36th, Wu Xu and Ji Hai. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 戊戌 and 己亥, 5 + 5 + 9 + 4 = 23; 49 − 23 = 26, whose 6 gives Water, and Water produces Wood, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences