Metal in the sand

Meaning

Metal in the sand is gold scattered in a riverbed, grain by grain. The tradition reads a worth that has to be gathered and sifted, talents that shine once they are brought together with patience.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Jia Wu and Yi Wei, the 16th of the thirty: a sound of Metal. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Metal sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Metal in the sea, Metal of the sword’s edge, Metal of white wax, Gold leaf metal and Metal of hairpins and bracelets.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Jia Wu, the Yang Wood Horse, and Yi Wei, the Yin Wood Goat: a Metal sound for two Wood 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: 1834–1835, 1894–1895, 1954–1955, 2014–2015, 2074–2075, 2134–2135 and 2194–2195, 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 31st and the 32nd, Jia Wu and Yi Wei. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 甲午 and 乙未, 9 + 9 + 8 + 8 = 34; 49 − 34 = 15, whose 5 gives Earth, and Earth produces Metal, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences