Mulberry wood

Meaning

Mulberry wood is the mulberry of the silk farms, whose leaves feed the silkworms. The tradition reads a quiet usefulness, a gift that makes the fine work of others possible.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Ren Zi and Gui Chou, the 25th of the thirty: a sound of Wood. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Wood sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Wood of the great forest, Willow wood, Pine and cypress wood, Wood of the plain and Pomegranate wood.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Ren Zi, the Yang Water Rat, and Gui Chou, the Yin Water Ox: a Wood sound for two Water stems, the Na Yin being a layer of its own beside the stem and the branch.
• On BaZi’s board, each pillar shows its Na Yin under its column, and its reading says what its phase is to the Day Master: the Correspondences below give it for all five phases.
• Its years, two in a row, each from Lichun: 1852–1853, 1912–1913, 1972–1973, 2032–2033, 2092–2093 and 2152–2153, in the 1800–2200 table.
• In the zodiac’s table, each of the four places, the year, the month, the day and the hour, gives the Na Yin of its pillar.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads a pillar’s Na Yin from the classical table of thirty (names.ts), one for each two pillars in the cycle’s order: this one for the 49th and the 50th, Ren Zi and Gui Chou. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 壬子 and 癸丑, 6 + 9 + 5 + 8 = 28; 49 − 28 = 21, whose 1 gives Water, and Water produces Wood, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences