Ren Shen · Yang Water Monkey

Meaning

Ren Shen is the river at its spring: Water is born in Shen, the Monkey’s branch, whose Metal feeds it. The tradition reads an intelligence with a source of its own, ideas that keep flowing and go far.

Ren over Shen: yang Water over yang Metal, a stem its branch produces, as Metal produces Water.

Ren, Yang Water, is the river and the sea: wide, moving, carrying everything along. The Monkey is clever, playful and inventive.

The zodiac reads a Ren Shen year as the Water Monkey’s. The Water Monkey is the most subtle of the Monkeys: perceptive, diplomatic, quick to understand people and situations. Its charm opens doors, and frankness keeps them open.

Its Na Yin, shared with Gui You, is Metal of the sword’s edge (劍鋒金 jiànfēng jīn): a sound of Metal, heard beside the pillar’s Water and Metal.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1812, 1872, 1932, 1992, 2052, 2112 and 2172, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Monkey month of every Jia or Ji year, opened by Start of Autumn, as in the solar years 2024 and 2029.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 27 February, 28 April, 27 June, 26 August, 25 October and 24 December.
• As an hour: the Monkey’s double hour, 15:00–17:00, of Jia and Ji days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ren, sitting on Shen, the partner palace: Shen holds Geng, Ren and Wu, Ren’s Indirect Resource, Companion and Seven Killings, and Ren stands at its Birth 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-saru, imsin and Nhâm Thân, with each language’s readings of 壬 and 申.

How Ulune calculates it

Ren Shen is the 9th of the sixty pillars: the 9th of the ten stems over the 9th 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 Shen belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Zi to Gui You, whose stems meet the branches from Zi to You and leave out Xu and Hai: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 5th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences