Ren Shen Pillar (壬申) — Yang Water over Monkey

What the two characters are

壬 Ren — A great river. Ren people think in large systems and are restless when confined to small ones.

申 Shen — the Monkey, a Metal branch covering 15:00 – 17:00. As a branch it is the third of the four layers a chart is read through: the animal name people know is only this one character, with no stem attached.

Ren Shen is the strongest of the first twelve in one specific sense: Yang Water on Shen stands on its own source, since the branch hides Geng Metal and Ren Water itself. Water here is rooted rather than merely present. The reading turns on whether the chart needs that much flow or is already drowning in it.

How the two meet

Inside a pillar the stem and the branch are not equal partners. The convention is to read them as a relationship: one of them is doing something to the other. Here, the branch generates the stem.

The branch feeds the stem. The support is real and it shows up as a pillar that holds its own without strain — the quality of the stem is available to the chart rather than being spent. Whether that translates into anything lasting still depends on whether the stem has an actual root in the more hidden layers.

The stem does have a root in this branch — one of the hidden stems matches its element, so what the stem is survives being used.

What is hidden in the branch

A branch is not one element. Each of the twelve carries up to three stems inside it — the main qi that gives it its name, and one or two lesser ones. Those hidden stems are where most of the actual weight in a chart comes from, and they are read even though nothing of them appears in the four visible characters.

When a practitioner says a pillar is strong or weak, this table is usually the reason — a stem with a hidden ally below it behaves nothing like the same stem sitting on an empty branch.

Where this pillar sits in the sixty

壬申 is number 9 of the sixty combinations. Its nayin — the classical image assigned to it — is 剑锋金 Metal of the Sword's Edge, a Metal image. The Metal images in the nayin table all describe something finished and unbending — buried in the sea, in sand, in a sword's edge, set in a hairpin. What changes between them is only where the finished thing ended up.

As a day pillar, this pair comes round every sixty days. The next six:

As a year pillar, the pair returns only once every sixty years — these are the recent and coming ones:

The day dates are calculated from the same engine that runs the chart calculator. Note that the Chinese day starts at 23:00: a birth late in the evening belongs to the next day pillar, which shifts the whole calculation by one.

Reading a pillar on its own

A single pillar is not a reading. What this page describes is the internal structure of 壬申 — which element is on top, what is underneath it, and whether the support is there. To turn that into something about a person you need the other three pillars and a day master to read them against, because the ten gods that carry the actual meaning are relationships to the day master rather than properties of a pillar.

The other pillars in this set

All of the sixty jiazi →

Common questions