Wood

Meaning

Wood is the phase of growth: the shoot that breaks through the soil in spring, the tree that rises towards the light and spreads its branches wide. “The Great Plan” says that wood bends and straightens, and the tradition reads both in it, the supple and the upright: the reach of a plan, the push of a beginning, the patience of a trunk that adds a ring every year.

It opens the generating cycle, the young yang that follows winter. Water feeds it, as rain feeds a forest; it feeds Fire, as wood feeds a flame; it checks Earth, its roots breaking up and holding the soil; and Metal checks it, as the axe and the pruning knife shape a tree.

Its gifts, as the tradition gives them, are vision, growth, generosity and the courage to start, and its virtue in the Confucian scheme is benevolence (仁 rén). Much of it is read as impatience and too many beginnings, a push that will not bend; little of it as plans that wait for encouragement. The tradition never asks to remove a phase but to balance it: what prunes, what puts the growth to use, what keeps it fed.

In practice

• In BaZi, two stems are Wood: Jia, yang Wood, the tall tree, and Yi, yin Wood, the vine and the flower. Two branches are Wood too, Yin and Mao, the Tiger and the Rabbit, the first months of spring. A Wood Day Master finds its resource in Water and its peers in Wood, its output in Fire, its wealth in Earth, and the power that shapes it in Metal.
• In Chinese astrology, the Tiger and the Rabbit are Wood animals by their branch, and every animal has its Wood years: 2024 was the Wood Dragon’s, 2025 the Wood Snake’s, and the next two are 2034 and 2035, the Wood Tiger’s and the Wood Rabbit’s.
• In Feng Shui, the east and the south-east are Wood, the palaces of the trigrams Zhen, thunder, and Xun, wind; so are the stars 3 Jade, the first stir of spring, and 4 Green, the star of letters and study.
• With little Wood, the tradition suggests plans, green places and long projects; with much of it, something that prunes and something that uses the growth.

Across traditions

• Chinese astronomy calls Jupiter the Wood star, 木星 mùxīng. Its round of the sky in about twelve years gave the Chinese calendar a way to count years, and Tai Sui, the year’s ruler, was imagined as its counterpart, moving round the sky the other way.
• Western astrology has no element of Wood: spring there belongs to Aries, a fire sign, Taurus, an earth sign, and Gemini, an air sign, and growth is rather the planet Jupiter’s theme.
• Trees carry a like meaning in many cultures, from the world tree of Norse myth to the tree of life of the Kabbalah; the Chinese Wood, though, is less a thing than a movement, the outward push every living thing shares.

Origin and history

The character 木 is a picture of a tree, its branches above and its roots below, and it is already written so on the oracle bones of the Shang dynasty, around 1200 BC. In the monthly ordinances of the Lüshi Chunqiu (c. 239 BC) and in the Huainanzi (139 BC), Wood rules the spring and the east, its colour is the green-blue 青 qīng and its emblem the Azure Dragon of the eastern sky. BaZi’s classics give the two Wood stems their images: in the Di Tian Sui, Jia towers to heaven like a great tree, and Yi, soft as it is, holds its own against harder things.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads Wood in the stems Jia and Yi and the branches Yin and Mao, whether they stand in a pillar or are hidden in another branch: Hai holds Jia among its hidden stems, Chen and Wei hold Yi. In BaZi’s balance each counts its points, and Wood is read as much of it from about 2.5 of the nine points, little under half a point. In Feng Shui, the east and south-east palaces and the stars 3 and 4 are Wood whatever the home. Ulune draws Wood in green.

Correspondences