Ren Wu · Yang Water Horse

Meaning

Ren Wu sends the river through the Horse’s midsummer fire, Water over the one phase it controls. The two are opposites, and the tradition reads a lively, adaptable spirit that keeps moving and finds its calm by choosing where to flow.

Ren over Wu: yang Water over yang Fire, a stem that controls its branch, as Water controls Fire.

Ren, Yang Water, is the river and the sea: wide, moving, carrying everything along. The Horse is free, lively and warm.

The zodiac reads a Ren Wu year as the Water Horse’s. The Water Horse is the most adaptable of the Horses: witty, sociable, quick to sense where the wind is turning. It loves change, and learns to stay when staying matters.

Its Na Yin, shared with Gui Wei, is Willow wood (楊柳木 yángliǔ mù): a sound of Wood, heard beside the pillar’s Water and Fire.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1822, 1882, 1942, 2002, 2062, 2122 and 2182, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Horse month of every Yi or Geng year, opened by Grain in Ear, as in the solar years 2020 and 2025.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 8 January, 9 March, 8 May, 7 July, 5 September and 4 November.
• As an hour: the Horse’s double hour, 11:00–13:00, of Yi and Geng days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ren, sitting on Wu, the partner palace: Wu holds Ding and Ji, Ren’s Direct Wealth and Direct Officer, and Ren stands at its Conception 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-uma, im-o and Nhâm Ngọ, with each language’s readings of 壬 and 午.

How Ulune calculates it

Ren Wu is the 19th of the sixty pillars: the 9th of the ten stems over the 7th 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 Wu belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Xu to Gui Wei, whose stems meet the branches from Xu to Wei and leave out Shen and You: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 10th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences