Yi Hai · Yin Wood Pig

Meaning

Yi Hai sets the vine over the Pig’s winter water, which feeds it, and the branch also holds Jia, a taller wood to lean on. The tradition reads a kindness that is well supported, warmth that grows with the company it keeps.

Yi over Hai: yin Wood over yin Water, a stem its branch produces, as Water produces Wood.

Yi, Yin Wood, is the vine and the flower: supple, finding its way round obstacles, thriving by what it leans on. The Pig is generous, sincere and good-natured.

The zodiac reads a Yi Hai year as the Wood Pig’s. The Wood Pig is the most sociable of the Pigs: warm, trusting, glad to bring people together. Its generosity seems without end, and it learns to keep a little for itself.

Its Na Yin, shared with Jia Xu, is Fire on the mountain top (山頭火 shāntóu huǒ): a sound of Fire, heard beside the pillar’s Wood and Water.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1815, 1875, 1935, 1995, 2055, 2115 and 2175, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Pig month of every Jia or Ji year, opened by Start of Winter, as in the solar years 2024 and 2029.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 1 January, 2 March, 1 May, 30 June, 29 August, 28 October and 27 December.
• As an hour: the Pig’s double hour, 21:00–23:00, of Jia and Ji days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Yi, sitting on Hai, the partner palace: Hai holds Ren and Jia, Yi’s Direct Resource and Rob Wealth, and Yi stands at its Rest 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-i, eulhae and Ất Hợi, with each language’s readings of 乙 and 亥.

How Ulune calculates it

Yi Hai is the 12th of the sixty pillars: the 2nd of the ten stems over the 12th 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 Hai belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Xu to Gui Wei, whose stems meet the branches from Xu to Wei and leave out Shen and You: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 6th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences