Wu Zi · Yang Earth Rat

Meaning

Wu Zi sets the mountain over the Rat’s deep water, Earth holding the phase it controls as a dam holds a lake. The tradition reads prudence and patient gathering, security built with care for oneself and one’s own.

Wu over Zi: yang Earth over yang Water, a stem that controls its branch, as Earth controls Water.

Wu, Yang Earth, is the mountain: solid, broad, unmoved by passing weather. The Rat is quick, alert and resourceful.

The zodiac reads a Wu Zi year as the Earth Rat’s. The Earth Rat is the Rat with its feet on the ground: prudent and practical, a careful builder of security for itself and its own. Slow to gamble, it rarely loses what it has made.

Its Na Yin, shared with Ji Chou, is Fire of the thunderbolt (霹靂火 pīlì huǒ): a sound of Fire, heard beside the pillar’s Earth and Water.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1828, 1888, 1948, 2008, 2068, 2128 and 2188, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Rat month of every Yi or Geng year, opened by Major Snow, as in the solar years 2020 and 2025.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 14 January, 15 March, 14 May, 13 July, 11 September and 10 November.
• As an hour: the Rat’s double hour, 23:00–01:00, of Bing and Xin days, whose first hour it is: by default Ulune’s day begins at 23:00.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Wu, sitting on Zi, the partner palace: Zi holds Gui, Wu’s Direct Wealth, and Wu stands at its Conception 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-ne, muja and Mậu Tý, with each language’s readings of 戊 and 子.

How Ulune calculates it

Wu Zi is the 25th of the sixty pillars: the 5th of the ten stems over the 1st 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 Zi belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Shen to Gui Si, whose stems meet the branches from Shen to Si and leave out Wu and Wei: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 13th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences