Pomegranate wood

Meaning

Pomegranate wood is the tree that bears its red fruit in autumn, full of seeds, when other trees are losing their leaves. The tradition reads late abundance and fertility, a richness that ripens in the season of Metal.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Geng Shen and Xin You, the 29th 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 Mulberry wood.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Geng Shen, the Yang Metal Monkey, and Xin You, the Yin Metal Rooster: a Wood sound for two Metal 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: 1800–1801, 1860–1861, 1920–1921, 1980–1981, 2040–2041, 2100–2101 and 2160–2161, 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 57th and the 58th, Geng Shen and Xin You. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 庚申 and 辛酉, 8 + 7 + 7 + 6 = 28; 49 − 28 = 21, whose 1 gives Water, and Water produces Wood, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences