Wu Chen Pillar (戊辰) — Yang Earth over Dragon

What the two characters are

戊 Wu — The mountain. Wu people are steady, reliable and slow to move once they have decided.

辰 Chen — the Dragon, a Earth branch covering 07:00 – 09:00. 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.

Wu Chen buries the mountain in wet earth. Yang Earth on Chen has a root (the Wu inside the branch) but also a storehouse of Water and Wood working against it, so the pillar reads as heavy and immovable rather than unstable. This is the one of the twelve where the reading turns most on what the rest of the chart does with all that hidden Water.

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 stem and the branch carry the same element.

When both characters sit on the same element the pillar reads as a single repeated voice: the quality is doubled, and so is whatever the stem is prone to. There is no internal counterweight to pull against it, so the reading depends almost entirely on the rest of the chart.

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

戊辰 is number 5 of the sixty combinations. Its nayin — the classical image assigned to it — is 大林木 Wood of the Great Forest, a Wood image. The Wood images are the most literal kind of growth — forest, willow, pine, mulberry. Each one is defined less by the plant than by the ground it was given to grow in.

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 戊辰 — 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