Nayin 纳音 · sound element #20 of 30
Metal beaten to its thinnest: maximum surface, minimum substance.
| Term 纳音 | 金箔金 — Gold Leaf (jin bo jin) |
|---|---|
| Element of the image | 金 Metal |
| Pillars it covers | 壬寅、癸卯 — Renyin and Guimao (pair #20 of 30) |
| Spelling in our edition | 金泊金 — the quotations below keep the book's characters rather than ours |
壬寅癸卯绝地存金，气尚柔弱，薄若缯缟，故曰金泊金
Why the name: Renyin and Guimao, metal kept in the ground of its severance, the qi still soft and weak, thin as silk gauze; hence Gold Leaf.
金泊金者，润色杯盘，增光宫室，打薄须借乎别金，描彩必假乎水力
Gold Leaf: it puts colour on cup and dish and adds light to palace and chamber; to be beaten thin it must borrow another metal, and to be laid as colour it must depend on the strength of water.
Yin and Mao are spring wood — metal's 绝 position, the point of severance where metal has least support. 薄若缯缟, thin as silk gauze, is the derivation naming exactly that weakness and then making it the function.
打薄须借乎别金，描彩必假乎水力 — it needs another metal to beat it thin and water's strength to lay it on. Both halves are borrowings. San Ming Tong Hui adds 此金甚微，非木则无所依 — this metal is very slight; without wood it has nothing to rest on. Our tables print 金箔金, the corpus writes 金泊金; the quotations above keep the book's spelling.
Sources: 《三命通会》 (San Ming Tong Hui, Ming dynasty, 万民英) — chapters 论纳音取象 and 释六十甲子性质吉凶. Both passages above are quoted from a local plain-text edition and checked character by character by a test before this page can ship. Translations are ours.
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