Fire at the foot of the mountain

Meaning

Fire at the foot of the mountain is the light of evening low in the valley, or a hearth at the bottom of the slope. The tradition reads a gentle, lasting warmth, closer to home than to the summit.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Bing Shen and Ding You, the 17th of the thirty: a sound of Fire. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Fire sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Fire in the furnace, Fire on the mountain top, Fire of the thunderbolt, Fire of the lamp and Fire in the sky.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Bing Shen, the Yang Fire Monkey, and Ding You, the Yin Fire Rooster: a Fire sound for two Fire 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: 1836–1837, 1896–1897, 1956–1957, 2016–2017, 2076–2077, 2136–2137 and 2196–2197, 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 33rd and the 34th, Bing Shen and Ding You. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 丙申 and 丁酉, 7 + 7 + 6 + 6 = 26; 49 − 26 = 23, whose 3 gives Wood, and Wood produces Fire, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences