Ren Yin · Yang Water Tiger

Meaning

Ren Yin sends the river into the Tiger’s young forest, Water feeding the Wood of the new spring. The tradition reads perceptiveness and generosity, a mind that nourishes the growth of others and moves when the time is right.

Ren over Yin: yang Water over yang Wood, a stem that produces its branch, as Water produces Wood.

Ren, Yang Water, is the river and the sea: wide, moving, carrying everything along. The Tiger is brave, magnetic and independent.

The zodiac reads a Ren Yin year as the Water Tiger’s. The Water Tiger is the most perceptive of the Tigers: open-minded, intuitive, calm under pressure. It reads people well and moves when the time is right rather than at once.

Its Na Yin, shared with Gui Mao, is Gold leaf metal (金箔金 jīnbó jīn): a sound of Metal, heard beside the pillar’s Water and Wood.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1842, 1902, 1962, 2022, 2082 and 2142, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Tiger month of every Ding or Ren year, opened by Start of Spring, as in the solar years 2022 and 2027.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 28 January, 29 March, 28 May, 27 July, 25 September and 24 November.
• As an hour: the Tiger’s double hour, 03:00–05:00, of Ding and Ren days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ren, sitting on Yin, the partner palace: Yin holds Jia, Bing and Wu, Ren’s Eating God, Indirect Wealth and Seven Killings, and Ren stands at its Retreat 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-tora, im-in and Nhâm Dần, with each language’s readings of 壬 and 寅.

How Ulune calculates it

Ren Yin is the 39th of the sixty pillars: the 9th of the ten stems over the 3rd 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 Yin belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Wu to Gui Mao, whose stems meet the branches from Wu to Mao and leave out Chen and Si: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 20th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences