The Five Elements Bureau and the Sixty Na Yin

This rhyme is usually called the 'five tigers' (the tiger being the Yin branch), and the logic behind it is stems combining and then producing. Jia and Ji combine into earth, and what produces earth is fire, so Yin starts at Bing fire. Yi and Geng combine into metal, and earth produces metal, so it starts at Wu. Bing and Xin combine into water, and metal produces water: Geng. Ding and Ren combine into wood, and water produces wood: Ren. Wu and Gui combine into fire, and wood produces fire: Jia. Remember this reasoning and there is nothing to memorise.

Once Yin is fixed, Mao, Chen and the rest follow in order through to Chou, and each of the twelve palaces has a stem, called the palace stem. In the Quan Shu the palace stem is used here only to fix the bureau; the later flying-star school uses it to fly the four transformations, and Xingge also uses it to mark the Origin Palace (the palace whose stem matches the birth-year stem). The stem and branch on every palace of the chart are laid out this way.

The Na Yin song gives one element to every two stem-branch pairs, and what you look up is the stem and branch of the Life Palace, not of the birth year. Once you have the element, turn it into a bureau: Water 2, Wood 3, Metal 4, Earth 5, Fire 6. A Life Palace of Yi Chou, for example, is metal in the sea, so Metal 4; a Life Palace of Bing Yin or Ding Mao is fire in the furnace, so Fire 6.

Note that the Na Yin element has nothing to do with the elements of the stem and branch themselves: in Jia Zi, Jia is wood and Zi is water, yet the Na Yin is metal. In Dou Shu, names like 'metal in the sea' or 'fire in the furnace' are used only for their element; their imagery is not used to read the chart.

For 'Jia Xu and Yi Hai, fire on the mountain top', the text note already explains the base text's 「甲戊」. In practice one regularity narrows the lookup: each two pairs share one Na Yin, and a yang stem always goes with a yang branch and a yin stem with a yin branch, so any one palace can only take five stems. With the Life Palace in Zi, for example, the stem can only be Jia, Bing, Wu, Geng or Ren, whose Na Yin are in turn metal in the sea, water in the ravine, thunderbolt fire, earth on the wall and wood of the mulberry. Put another way, the Five Elements Bureau is decided by just two things: the birth-year stem and the branch of the Life Palace.

An example from start to finish: born in a Bing year, Life Palace in Zi. Bing and Xin years start at Geng Yin, so Yin is Geng, Mao is Xin and so on all the way to Zi, which is Geng Zi. The Na Yin of Geng Zi is earth on the wall, so this is Earth 5. Bing Xu and Ding Hai, earth on the roof, and Ren Chen and Gui Si, water of the long stream, in this line are used the same way.

The bureau number has two visible effects on the chart: which palace Zi Wei falls in, and at what age the first Decade Luck begins. For someone in Earth 5, the Decade Luck ages on the Life Palace of a Xingge chart start at 5, as in '5–14'.

The copying error in the 'wood of the plain' line is explained in the text note. One easily confused point is worth adding. The Quan Shu also has another way of reading a chart by the Na Yin of the birth year, for instance 「納音墓庫看何宮」 in the star-combinations chapter (see the line): for a person of water fate, the tomb is in Chen. There, 'Na Yin' means the birth year's stem and branch; someone born in a Jia Wu year, for example, is metal in the sand. Fixing the Five Elements Bureau uses the stem and branch of the Life Palace instead. Keep the two apart.

'Metal of hairpins and bracelets' and 'wood of the mulberry' are images the ancients chose; the text note deals with the character forms. In this line, Wu Shen and Ji You, earth of the great post road, give Earth 5, and Bing Wu and Ding Wei, water of the Heavenly River, give Water 2.

A way to check your own working: the Five Elements Bureau must always agree with the stem and branch of the Life Palace. Find the Life Palace on a Xingge chart, read the stem and branch shown in it, and look that pair up in this song; the element should match the bureau shown on the chart. If it doesn't, the palace stems were probably laid out wrong, most often by counting Zi and Chou backward.

The last group, Ren Xu and Gui Hai, water of the great sea, completes the sixty pairs in thirty groups. Once the bureau is fixed, several later steps depend on it: Zi Wei's position is read from the bureau charts (see the setup charts); the age at which the Decade Luck starts follows the bureau number (Water 2 starts at age two, Fire 6 at age six); and the starting point of the twelve Chang Sheng spirits is also set by the bureau (the fire bureau starts Chang Sheng at Yin, and so on). That is why Placing the Life and Body Palaces urges that this song be learned by heart.