Wu Shen · Yang Earth Monkey

Meaning

Wu Shen is the mountain with ore in it, Earth producing the Metal of the Monkey’s early autumn. The tradition reads a mind that puts its wits to serious work, generous with its gifts and steady enough to be counted on.

Wu over Shen: yang Earth over yang Metal, a stem that produces its branch, as Earth produces Metal.

Wu, Yang Earth, is the mountain: solid, broad, unmoved by passing weather. The Monkey is clever, playful and inventive.

The zodiac reads a Wu Shen year as the Earth Monkey’s. The Earth Monkey is the most reliable of the Monkeys: clever, studious, more patient than its cousins. It puts its wits to serious work, and others can count on it.

Its Na Yin, shared with Ji You, is Earth of the great road (大驛土 dàyì tǔ): a sound of Earth, heard beside the pillar’s Earth and Metal.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1848, 1908, 1968, 2028, 2088 and 2148, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Monkey month of every Ding or Ren year, opened by Start of Autumn, as in the solar years 2022 and 2027.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 3 February, 4 April, 3 June, 2 August, 1 October and 30 November.
• As an hour: the Monkey’s double hour, 15:00–17:00, of Ding and Ren days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Wu, sitting on Shen, the partner palace: Shen holds Geng, Ren and Wu, Wu’s Eating God, Indirect Wealth and Companion, and Wu stands at its Retreat stage there.
• As a luck pillar or a year, it brings each Day Master the god of its stem and the god of its branch’s main qi: the Correspondences below give them for all ten.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the same pillar is tsuchinoe-saru, musin and Mậu Thân, with each language’s readings of 戊 and 申.

How Ulune calculates it

Wu Shen is the 45th of the sixty pillars: the 5th of the ten stems over the 9th of the twelve branches, which the cycle moves on one step together, so that a stem only ever meets the branches of its polarity. Ulune counts a year’s pillar from Lichun, 1984 being Jia Zi; a month’s twelve a year through the cycle, from Bing Yin in the Tiger month of 1984 (the rule of the five tigers); a day’s by the count of days, 1 January 2000 being Wu Wu; an hour’s twelve a day (the rule of the five rats).

Wu Shen belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Chen to Gui Chou, whose stems meet the branches from Chen to Chou and leave out Yin and Mao: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 23rd of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences