Day Pillar #17 · 庚辰
| Position in the cycle | #17 of 60 |
|---|---|
| Heavenly stem 天干 | 庚 — 金 Metal |
| Earthly branch 地支 | 辰 — 土 Earth |
| Nayin 纳音 | 白蜡金 — White Wax Metal (Metal) |
| Hidden stems 藏干 | 戊、乙、癸 — 戊 (Earth), 乙 (Wood), 癸 (Water) |
| Twelve-stage placement 十二长生 | 养 — Nurture (of the stem in its own branch) |
There is a formatting detail in San Ming Tong Hui that is easy to miss, because it lives in a single character.
The book runs a register of all sixty pillars, each with a one-line statement of what it likes. Almost all of them simply name a thing. Three name a thing and then put a limit on how much of it.
庚辰金，锡蜡，喜秋及微木。
Gengchen metal: tin and wax. It likes autumn, and slight wood.
壬寅金，金之华饰者，喜木及微火。
Renyin metal: metal as ornament. It likes wood, and slight fire.
庚戌金，刃剑之余，喜微火及木。
Gengxu metal: what is left over from blade-making. It likes slight fire, and wood.
微 — slight. We scanned the whole register for any qualifier of degree attached to a 喜 clause. It occurs three times, and all three are metal.
Fire refines metal. Wood is what metal cuts. The two capped substances are precisely the two things metal acts on or is acted on by — its work and its counterpart. Nothing else in any of the three lines is limited.
And the limit is not a general rule about metal, which the register makes obvious by putting an uncapped metal a few lines away:
甲子金，为宝物，喜金木旺地。
Jiazi metal: it is a treasure. It likes metal and wood in their flourishing ground.
甲子 Jiazi and 庚辰 are both metal, and both like wood. One wants it flourishing; the other wants it slight. Same element, same remedy, opposite dosage.
Read them together: tin and wax (锡蜡), ornament (华饰), blade offcuts (刃剑之余). Soft, thin, residual.
The dose limit appears exactly where the metal is described as something that cannot take much — not as a property of metal in general. Whether that is deliberate on 万民英's part or an artefact of a register compiled from several sources, we do not know. The entries are not uniform in other respects either.
庚辰辛巳以金居火土之地，气已发生，金尚在矿，
Gengchen and Xinsi: metal seated in the ground of fire and earth. The energy has already arisen, but the metal is still in the ore.
Still in the ore. Not yet a made thing. That is the same claim as 锡蜡 and 刃剑之余, in a different vocabulary — and it explains why the same chapter, in the very next breath, splits this nayin's two pillars against each other. See 辛巳 Xinsi, where the split is the whole story.
It is a small observation and we want to be honest about how it was found: we noticed it while checking something else, and our first reading was wrong. We initially thought 庚辰 was the only pillar with a dose limit. Scanning the full register turned up three.
The three-pillar conclusion is stronger than the one-pillar version would have been — but that is luck, not method. The method error was asserting from a partial reading, and it is the same error that once produced a corruption-detection run reporting 64% false positives on this site. We now scan the whole table before making a claim about the table.
If you have a different edition: does yours print 微 in all three of those lines? A missing 微 in any of them would be a collatable variant, and we are keeping a list.
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.
Open the chart calculator →甲子 Jiazi · 乙丑 Yichou · 丙寅 Bingyin · 丁卯 Dingmao · 壬申 Renshen · 癸酉 Guiyou · all sixty →