Xin Mao · Yin Metal Rabbit

Meaning

Xin Mao holds a fine blade over the Rabbit’s tender wood of mid-spring, the gardener’s pruning knife rather than the axe. The tradition reads refinement with resolve, a sure eye for quality that is best when it trims with care.

Xin over Mao: yin Metal over yin Wood, a stem that controls its branch, as Metal controls Wood.

Xin, Yin Metal, is the jewel and the fine blade: refined, precise, shining when it is washed clean. The Rabbit is gentle, refined and tactful.

The zodiac reads a Xin Mao year as the Metal Rabbit’s. The Metal Rabbit pairs refinement with resolve: discerning, ambitious in its quiet way, with a sure eye for quality. Its standards are high, and it learns to share them gently.

Its Na Yin, shared with Geng Yin, is Pine and cypress wood (松柏木 sōngbǎi mù): a sound of Wood, heard beside the pillar’s Metal and Wood.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1831, 1891, 1951, 2011, 2071, 2131 and 2191, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Rabbit month of every Bing or Xin year, opened by Awakening of Insects, as in the solar years 2021 and 2026.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 17 January, 18 March, 17 May, 16 July, 14 September and 13 November.
• As an hour: the Rabbit’s double hour, 05:00–07:00, of Bing and Xin days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Xin, sitting on Mao, the partner palace: Mao holds Yi, Xin’s Indirect Wealth, and Xin stands at its Pause 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 kanoto-u, sinmyo and Tân Mão, with each language’s readings of 辛 and 卯.

How Ulune calculates it

Xin Mao is the 28th of the sixty pillars: the 8th of the ten stems over the 4th 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).

Xin Mao 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 14th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences