Earth in the sand

Meaning

Earth in the sand is light ground mixed with sand, loose underfoot and quick to change shape. The tradition reads adaptability and a fertility that shows wherever care and water reach it.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Bing Chen and Ding Si, the 27th of the thirty: a sound of Earth. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Earth sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Earth by the roadside, Earth on the city wall, Earth on the roof, Earth on the wall and Earth of the great road.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Bing Chen, the Yang Fire Dragon, and Ding Si, the Yin Fire Snake: a Earth 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: 1856–1857, 1916–1917, 1976–1977, 2036–2037, 2096–2097 and 2156–2157, 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 53rd and the 54th, Bing Chen and Ding Si. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 丙辰 and 丁巳, 7 + 5 + 6 + 4 = 22; 49 − 22 = 27, whose 7 gives Fire, and Fire produces Earth, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences