Wu · Yang Earth

Meaning

Wu is the fifth Heavenly Stem and the yang side of Earth: earth as a mountain is earth, massive, high and still, the dyke that holds back a river, the wall that shelters a city. It stands at the centre of the ten, where the cycle turns from the rising half to the gathering half, and the Di Tian Sui gives it the weight of that place: “Wu earth is solid and heavy, centred and upright.”

It is read as reliability, calm and a quiet authority: the person others lean on, who keeps a promise, holds a group together and does not panic. A mountain does not hurry, and Wu builds slowly and for a long time, with a broad view from the top. Its difficulty is the mountain’s too: it can be slow to move, hard to shift once settled, more comfortable keeping things as they are than letting them change, and so solid that others forget it has needs.

The classics give the mountain a life of its own. At rest, the Di Tian Sui says, it gathers; moving, it opens; and it holds the fate of the ten thousand things, which grow when Water keeps it moist and wither when Fire dries it out. In the north-east and the south-west, the Earth corners of the compass, it prefers stillness to shocks. The tradition reads Wu as the ground that needs both rain and sun to be fertile.

In practice

• As the Day Master, Wu finds its resources in Fire, Bing its Indirect Resource and Ding its Direct Resource, and its peers in Earth, Ji being its Rob Wealth. Metal is its output, Geng its Eating God and Xin its Hurting Officer; Water is its wealth, Ren indirect and Gui direct; Wood shapes it, Jia its Seven Killings and Yi its Direct Officer.
• Its roots: Wu is the main qi of two of the four storehouse branches, Chen, the Dragon, and Xu, the Dog, and is hidden in Si, Yin and Shen: the most widely rooted of the stems. Ulune follows the Zi Ping school, where Earth goes through the life stages with Fire: Wu is born in Yin, prospers in Si and stands at its peak in the Horse’s branch, Wu 午.
• Its partners: Wu combines with Gui, yin Water, its Direct Wealth, a pair that leans towards Fire. As an Earth stem, at the centre, it clashes with no other stem.
• In time: the years ending in 8 are Wu years, counted from Lichun: 2028 will be the Earth Monkey’s, and 2018 was the Earth Dog’s. A Wu or Gui year opens with a Jia-Yin month, and a Wu or Gui day with a Ren-Zi hour.
• In Feng Shui, Wu has no mountain on the luopan: with Ji, the other Earth stem, it belongs to the centre of the compass, and the 24 mountains leave both out.

Across traditions

• In Japan 戊 is read tsuchinoe, “elder brother of earth”; in Korea mu, in Vietnam Mậu. As the fifth letter of Chinese lists it is the E, and in chemistry five carbon atoms, 戊烷 wùwán, pentane.
• The sacred mountain stands at the centre of many cosmologies, the world’s axis: Mount Meru in India and Tibet, Olympus in Greece, the Kunlun of Chinese myth. Wu carries the same sense of a still centre that holds the world in place.
• Western astrology gives the qualities of a mountain to its fixed earth sign, Taurus, and to Saturn, the planet of structure and time, which Chinese astronomy calls the Earth star.

Origin and history

On the oracle bones 戊 is a weapon, a broad-bladed axe on a long handle, and names the fifth day of the Shang week; the Shang offered to Da Wu and other ancestors on Wu days. The Lüshi Chunqiu (c. 239 BC), in its monthly ordinances, gives the centre and the heart of the year to the days Wu and Ji, and Ban Gu explained the stem by abundance: things grow lush and full in Wu. Xu Shen’s Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100) names Wu the central palace.

BaZi’s classics made Wu the mountain. The Yuanhai Ziping of the Song dynasty and the San Ming Tong Hui of the Ming set out its relations, and the Di Tian Sui’s verse, read with Ren Tieqiao’s commentary of the Qing dynasty, describes a heavy, upright earth that gathers when still and opens when it moves. Whether Earth follows Fire or Water through the life stages has long been debated; the Zi Ping school, and Ulune with it, lets it follow Fire.

How Ulune calculates it

Wu is the stem of six of the sixty pillars, Wu-Chen, Wu-Yin, Wu-Zi, Wu-Xu, Wu-Shen and Wu-Wu, each joining it to a yang branch; Wu-Wu, the Earth Horse, fell on 1 January 2000, the day Ulune’s count of days is checked against. In BaZi’s balance a visible Wu counts one point of Earth, a hidden one its weight (0.6 in Chen and in Xu, 0.3 in Si, 0.1 in Yin and in Shen, twice in the month branch). For a Wu Day Master Ulune counts the life stages forward from Yin, as for Bing, and finds its symbolic stars by the classical verses: the Nobleman in Chou and Wei, the Academic star in Shen, the Prosperity star in Si and the Sword Edge in the Horse’s branch. The pages draw Wu in Earth’s ochre.

Correspondences