Xin You · Yin Metal Rooster

Meaning

Xin You sets the jewel on the Rooster’s pure Metal at mid-autumn, the stem on the branch of its stipend. The tradition reads high standards and clear judgement, at their best when they are as kind as they are exact.

Xin over You: yin Metal over yin Metal, a stem standing on its own phase.

Xin, Yin Metal, is the jewel and the fine blade: refined, precise, shining when it is washed clean. The Rooster is observant, frank and hard-working.

The zodiac reads a Xin You year as the Metal Rooster’s. The Metal Rooster is the Rooster twice over: exacting, honest, sure of its judgement. It aims for excellence and often reaches it, and gains by being as kind as it is right.

Its Na Yin, shared with Geng Shen, is Pomegranate wood (石榴木 shíliú mù): a sound of Wood, heard beside the pillar’s Metal.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1801, 1861, 1921, 1981, 2041, 2101 and 2161, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Rooster month of every Wu or Gui year, opened by White Dew, as in the solar years 2023 and 2028.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 16 February, 17 April, 16 June, 15 August, 14 October and 13 December.
• As an hour: the Rooster’s double hour, 17:00–19:00, of Wu and Gui days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Xin, sitting on You, the partner palace: You holds Xin, Xin’s Companion, and Xin stands at its Prosperity 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-tori, sinyu and Tân Dậu, with each language’s readings of 辛 and 酉.

How Ulune calculates it

Xin You is the 58th of the sixty pillars: the 8th of the ten stems over the 10th 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 You belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Yin to Gui Hai, whose stems meet the branches from Yin to Hai and leave out Zi and Chou: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 29th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences