Earth on the roof

Meaning

Earth on the roof is clay that fire has turned into tiles, laid over a home. The tradition reads protection and care for a household, a usefulness shaped by trial into shelter.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Bing Xu and Ding Hai, the 12th of the thirty: a sound of Earth. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Earth sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Earth by the roadside, Earth on the city wall, Earth on the wall, Earth of the great road and Earth in the sand.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Bing Xu, the Yang Fire Dog, and Ding Hai, the Yin Fire Pig: a Earth sound for two Fire 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: 1826–1827, 1886–1887, 1946–1947, 2006–2007, 2066–2067, 2126–2127 and 2186–2187, 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 23rd and the 24th, Bing Xu and Ding Hai. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 丙戌 and 丁亥, 7 + 5 + 6 + 4 = 22; 49 − 22 = 27, whose 7 gives Fire, and Fire produces Earth, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences