Yi Mao · Yin Wood Rabbit

Meaning

Yi Mao opens the flower in the Rabbit’s green month, the stem on the branch of its stipend, Wood in its own season. The tradition reads gentleness as a strength: harmony, generosity and the confidence to say no when needed.

Yi over Mao: yin Wood over yin Wood, a stem standing on its own phase.

Yi, Yin Wood, is the vine and the flower: supple, finding its way round obstacles, thriving by what it leans on. The Rabbit is gentle, refined and tactful.

The zodiac reads a Yi Mao year as the Wood Rabbit’s. The Wood Rabbit is kind and generous: it likes harmony, gives easily and is happiest among friends. Its gentleness is a strength, and it learns to say no when it needs to.

Its Na Yin, shared with Jia Yin, is Water of the great stream (大溪水 dàxī shuǐ): a sound of Water, heard beside the pillar’s Wood.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1855, 1915, 1975, 2035, 2095 and 2155, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Rabbit month of every Wu or Gui year, opened by Awakening of Insects, as in the solar years 2023 and 2028.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 10 February, 11 April, 10 June, 9 August, 8 October and 7 December.
• As an hour: the Rabbit’s double hour, 05:00–07:00, of Wu and Gui days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Yi, sitting on Mao, the partner palace: Mao holds Yi, Yi’s Companion, and Yi 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 kinoto-u, eulmyo and Ất Mão, with each language’s readings of 乙 and 卯.

How Ulune calculates it

Yi Mao is the 52nd of the sixty pillars: the 2nd 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).

Yi Mao 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 26th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences