Day Pillar #43 · 丙午
| Position in the cycle | #43 of 60 |
|---|---|
| Heavenly stem 天干 | 丙 — 火 Fire |
| Earthly branch 地支 | 午 — 火 Fire |
| Nayin 纳音 | 天河水 — Heaven's River Water (Water) |
| Hidden stems 藏干 | 丁、己 — 丁 (Fire), 己 (Earth) |
| Twelve-stage placement 十二长生 | 帝旺 — Peak (of the stem in its own branch) |
丙 is yang fire. 午 is the fire branch at its peak, and its hidden stems are 丁, fire again, and 己, earth. Stem and branch are both fire; the stem sits at 帝旺, the peak of its own cycle, in its own branch. There is very little in this pillar that is not fire.
Its nayin is water.
丙午，支干旺于南方，乃火之位，纳音属水，乃火中之水，非天河不能有之。
Bingwu: branch and stem flourish in the south, which is the seat of fire; yet its nayin belongs to water — water within fire, which nothing but the Heavenly River could hold.
非天河不能有之 is doing real work. The book is not shrugging at the anomaly; it is saying that a water of this kind cannot be an ordinary water, and then naming where such a water could exist. The name 天河水, Heavenly River Water — the Milky Way — is the answer to the problem, not a decoration on top of it.
银河之水，土不能克，故见土不忌，而且有滋润之益；天上之水，地金难生，故见金难益，而亦有涵秀之情；
The water of the Silver River cannot be controlled by earth, so meeting earth is not a thing to avoid — indeed there is the benefit of moistening. Water of the heavens is hard for earthly metal to generate, so meeting metal brings little gain — though there is still a quality of contained refinement.
Earth controls water. Metal generates water. These are two of the first relations anyone learns in five-phase theory, and the register states that neither applies here.
The reasoning it gives is not mystical and takes one line: this water is not on the ground. Earth lies on the surface, so it cannot reach up to control it. Metal lies beneath the surface, so it cannot reach up to generate it. The exemption follows from position, not from special pleading — which is the part we find interesting, because it means the rule is arguable rather than merely asserted.
Note too that the book does not simply cancel the two relations. It replaces each with a weaker residual effect: earth still moistens, metal still confers 涵秀. The relations are not deleted, they are demoted.
以济火中之水，惟天上乃有，故曰天河水；
To supply water within fire — only in the heavens does such a thing exist. Hence "Heavenly River Water."
Read with the pillar's composition, this is a water that has been driven up by the fire underneath and falls back down. It is not generated water; it is extracted water. That is a different origin from any of the other water nayin, and it is why the ordinary generation relation does not describe it.
戊子人得丙午，或丙午人得戊子，无不贵。盖火中生水，水中藏火，水火既济，精神运动，必灵异于人矣。
One with Wuzi who obtains Bingwu, or one with Bingwu who obtains Wuzi — there is none who is not noble. For fire generates water within and water conceals fire within; water and fire complete each other, spirit and vitality are set in motion, and such a person is necessarily marked out from others.
戊子 Wuzi #25 is stem and branch both water, with a nayin of fire — 霹雳火. The register has constructed a matched pair by taking the anomaly and reversing it, and it says so in the same breath.
Nayin is not a decorative label attached to the stem-and-branch pair. It behaves like a separate layer with rules of its own, and those rules occasionally contradict the main generation-and-control cycle — openly, with stated reasons. If you have only ever met nayin as a table to be memorised, this is the pillar that makes the case that it was once something else. On how that layer is generated rather than looked up, see 甲子 Jiazi.
The天河水 chapter contains the line 气当升降在高明火位有水沛然作霖, and our two witness editions punctuate it differently:
- our primary text: 气当升降，在高明火位，有水沛然作霖 - the Siku Quanshu edition at ctext: 气当升降在高明。火位有水，沛然作霖
The characters are identical; the parsing is not, and the two readings put the water in different places. That difference is load-bearing for this page's argument, so we are not using the sentence at all rather than silently picking the reading that suits us.
This is our standing rule: where a passage's punctuation is disputed between witnesses, it does not go into short-form content, and it only appears in long form with the dispute set out. Everything else quoted above is identical in both editions.
Sources: 《三命通会》 (San Ming Tong Hui, Ming, 万民英) and 《滴天髓》 (Di Tian Sui) — both quoted from local plain-text editions and verified character by character. Translations are ours. Corrections are welcome.
Enter a birth date and time to get the four pillars, the hidden stems, the nayin and the twelve-stage placements for a real chart — the same tables this page is built on.
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