Willow wood

Meaning

Willow wood is the willow on the riverbank, quick to grow and quick to root again from a single branch. The tradition reads grace and suppleness, a resilience that bends with the wind instead of breaking.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Ren Wu and Gui Wei, the 10th of the thirty: a sound of Wood. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Wood sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Wood of the great forest, Pine and cypress wood, Wood of the plain, Mulberry wood and Pomegranate wood.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Ren Wu, the Yang Water Horse, and Gui Wei, the Yin Water Goat: a Wood sound for two Water 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: 1822–1823, 1882–1883, 1942–1943, 2002–2003, 2062–2063, 2122–2123 and 2182–2183, 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 19th and the 20th, Ren Wu and Gui Wei. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 壬午 and 癸未, 6 + 9 + 5 + 8 = 28; 49 − 28 = 21, whose 1 gives Water, and Water produces Wood, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences