Yi Chou · Yin Wood Ox

Meaning

Yi Chou sets the vine on the Ox’s frozen field at the end of winter, Wood rooted in an Earth it holds together. The tradition reads quiet tenacity, a suppleness that keeps its grip through the cold and knows that spring is near.

Yi over Chou: yin Wood over yin Earth, a stem that controls its branch, as Wood controls Earth.

Yi, Yin Wood, is the vine and the flower: supple, finding its way round obstacles, thriving by what it leans on. The Ox is patient, steady and strong.

The zodiac reads a Yi Chou year as the Wood Ox’s. The Wood Ox joins the Ox’s patience to a wish to cooperate: steady and fair, it works well with others and keeps its word. More flexible than most Oxen, it loses none of their backbone.

Its Na Yin, shared with Jia Zi, is Metal in the sea (海中金 hǎizhōng jīn): a sound of Metal, heard beside the pillar’s Wood and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1805, 1865, 1925, 1985, 2045, 2105 and 2165, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Ox month of every Wu or Gui year, opened by Minor Cold, as in the solar years 2023 and 2028.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 20 February, 21 April, 20 June, 19 August, 18 October and 17 December.
• As an hour: the Ox’s double hour, 01:00–03:00, of Jia and Ji days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Yi, sitting on Chou, the partner palace: Chou holds Ji, Gui and Xin, Yi’s Indirect Wealth, Indirect Resource and Seven Killings, and Yi stands at its Decline 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 kinoto-ushi, eulchuk and Ất Sửu, with each language’s readings of 乙 and 丑.

How Ulune calculates it

Yi Chou is the 2nd of the sixty pillars: the 2nd of the ten stems over the 2nd 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).

Yi Chou belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Zi to Gui You, whose stems meet the branches from Zi to You and leave out Xu and Hai: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 1st of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences