Ren Chen · Yang Water Dragon

Meaning

Ren Chen lets the river flow into the Dragon, the storehouse of Water, whose earth gives it banks. The tradition reads a power that is channelled, a calm, broad mind whose strength lasts because it is contained.

Ren over Chen: yang Water over yang Earth, a stem its branch controls, as Earth controls Water.

Ren, Yang Water, is the river and the sea: wide, moving, carrying everything along. The Dragon, the only creature of legend among the twelve, stands for vitality and good fortune.

The zodiac reads a Ren Chen year as the Water Dragon’s. The Water Dragon is the calmest of the Dragons: wise, open, diplomatic, it lets things come to it and steers them gently. Its power is quiet and lasting.

Its Na Yin, shared with Gui Si, is Long-flowing water (長流水 chángliú shuǐ): a sound of Water, heard beside the pillar’s Water and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1832, 1892, 1952, 2012, 2072, 2132 and 2192, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Dragon month of every Bing or Xin year, opened by Clear and Bright, as in the solar years 2021 and 2026.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 18 January, 19 March, 18 May, 17 July, 15 September and 14 November.
• As an hour: the Dragon’s double hour, 07:00–09:00, of Bing and Xin days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ren, sitting on Chen, the partner palace: Chen holds Wu, Yi and Gui, Ren’s Seven Killings, Hurting Officer and Rob Wealth, and Ren stands at its Storehouse stage there.
• As a luck pillar or a year, it brings each Day Master the god of its stem and the god of its branch’s main qi: the Correspondences below give them for all ten.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the same pillar is mizunoe-tatsu, imjin and Nhâm Thìn, with each language’s readings of 壬 and 辰.

How Ulune calculates it

Ren Chen is the 29th of the sixty pillars: the 9th of the ten stems over the 5th of the twelve branches, which the cycle moves on one step together, so that a stem only ever meets the branches of its polarity. Ulune counts a year’s pillar from Lichun, 1984 being Jia Zi; a month’s twelve a year through the cycle, from Bing Yin in the Tiger month of 1984 (the rule of the five tigers); a day’s by the count of days, 1 January 2000 being Wu Wu; an hour’s twelve a day (the rule of the five rats).

Ren Chen belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Shen to Gui Si, whose stems meet the branches from Shen to Si and leave out Wu and Wei: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 15th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences