Rabbit

Meaning

The Rabbit is the fourth of the twelve animals, the animal of the branch Mao: Wood, yin, the east, sunrise and the heart of spring, the month of the equinox. Its season is the one in which everything grows gently and at once, and the tradition reads in the Rabbit the same soft persistence: a strength that never shoves, a grace that wins people over.

Ulune’s portrait reads it as gentle, refined and tactful: it prefers persuasion to force and peace to quarrels; attentive to beauty and comfort, it makes every place it lives in more pleasant. Its gifts are kindness, diplomacy, taste and prudence. What the tradition asks it to watch is the other side of its tact: avoiding a conflict until it grows, and a caution that lets good chances pass.

In China the hare lives on the Moon, where the Jade Rabbit pounds the elixir of life beside the goddess Chang’e, and the Rabbit keeps something of the Moon’s quiet light: a sensitivity to moods, an imagination, a wish for harmony. Its phase is Wood at its purest, the meadow of spring rather than the tree.

In practice

• As the year animal, the Rabbit is how others see a person and the generation they share: those born from Lichun 2023 to Lichun 2024 are Water Rabbits, from Lichun 2035 Wood Rabbits.
• As the inner, true and secret animal: as the month animal, Ulune reads the Rabbit’s sensitivity inside, a need for peace, beauty and gentle surroundings; as the day animal, a partner tender and attentive, a maker of harmony who flourishes in a calm and kind home; as the hour animal, a dreamer who keeps a quiet, well-ordered world of their own.
• The five Rabbits: the Wood Rabbit gives easily and is happiest among friends, the Fire Rabbit is the warmest, a natural host, the Earth Rabbit is grounded and loves its home, the Metal Rabbit pairs refinement with resolve, the Water Rabbit is the most intuitive. Wood came in 1975, Fire in 1987, Earth in 1999, Metal in 2011, Water in 2023, and Wood again in 2035.
• Its relations: the Rabbit’s allies are the Goat and the Pig, its trine of Wood; its partner in harmony is the Dog. It clashes with the Rooster, harms the Dragon, forms the uncivil punishment with the Rat and a destruction with the Horse.
• In time: the Rabbit’s own years return every twelve, 2023 and 2035; a Rooster year such as 2029 is its clash year; the Dog, Goat and Pig years are its friendly ones.

Across traditions

• In Japan the Rabbit is usagi, and its rabbit in the Moon pounds rice cakes rather than an elixir; in Korea it is tokki; in Vietnam the branch Mão has the cat, mèo, instead.
• The hare in the Moon is told far beyond China: in the Buddhist Jātaka tales a hare offers itself as food to a hungry traveller, who is a god in disguise and sets its image in the Moon; Aztec stories also saw a rabbit there.
• In Europe the hare of Easter belongs to the same season, the spring equinox, which falls in the Rabbit’s month; Western astrology opens Aries at that equinox, a sign of push rather than of gentleness, the other face of spring.

Origin and history

The Rabbit is the animal of Mao in Wang Chong’s Lunheng, in the 1st century, which says that Mao is Wood and its creature the hare. Its link with the Moon is older still: the silk banner found in the tomb of the Lady of Dai at Mawangdui, from the 2nd century BC, already shows a hare and a toad on the crescent Moon, and Han poets wrote of the hare pounding medicine there. The Mid-Autumn Festival, with its mooncakes and rabbit lanterns, keeps the image alive.

BaZi’s classics read the branch Mao, pure Wood and one of the four Peach Blossom branches, rather than the Rabbit itself. The Rabbit’s portrait as it is known now, the gentle diplomat with a taste for beauty, 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 Rabbit is the branch Mao: a year, month, day or hour whose pillar’s branch is Mao is a Rabbit. Ulune counts the Rabbit year from Lichun and gives the other answer when Chinese New Year would differ; the Rabbit month runs from Jingzhe, about 6 March, to Qingming in early April, and holds the spring equinox; the Rabbit hour runs from 05:00 to 07:00 on true solar time. On Ulune’s wheel the Rabbit stands at the east, a quarter turn clockwise from the Rat. Its portraits, with its five phases and its places, are Ulune’s own texts, written from what popular books commonly say.

Correspondences