The Mountain and the Wall

The character

戊 (wù) stands fifth among the ten heavenly stems: Earth, Yang. Its partner is 己 (jǐ), Yin Earth, the field and the garden. Where 己 is ground that people plant in, 戊 is ground that people look up at: the mountain on the horizon, the cliff behind the village, the great dyke, the plateau, the rammed-earth wall that runs around a city and gives it a name.

The old Ziping texts sum the stem up in one famous passage, from the Dī Tiān Suǐ (滴天髓), a work that BaZi readers have quoted for centuries. This book gives the eight short lines in Chinese, with its own plain translation.

The lines follow the 滴天髓闡微, the edition that carries the commentary of Ren Tieqiao (任鐵樵), the best-known commentator on the work. The other old edition, the 滴天髓輯要, phrases lines 5 and 6 a little differently: when Water is plentiful living things come up, and when Fire dries the mountain it longs for moisture. The sense is close, though that version dwells on the wish for water more than on the harm.

Take the lines one at a time.

Firm and heavy (固重). The mountain does not hurry and cannot be hurried. Weight is the first fact about 戊. A person with this Day Master often arrives in a room and the room rearranges itself a little around them, without a word having been said. People feel the mass before they hear the voice.

Central and upright (中正). Earth sits at the centre of the five elements, and a mountain stands where it stands because the land rose there. Both ideas carry a sense of fairness. Others bring their disputes to 戊 because the mountain looks the same from every side.

Drawn together at rest, open in motion (靜翕動闢). The two verbs describe a gate. When nothing is asked of it, 戊 closes: the person is quiet, inward, almost unreadable. When something has to move, the whole mass opens at once. There is no half-way setting, and that is both the beauty and the difficulty of this stem. The old note printed under the verse reads the same pair of verbs as the turn of the year: open in spring and summer, when the mountain brings things to life, and closed in autumn and winter, when it gathers them in.

Keeper of ten thousand lives (萬物司命). Rivers start in mountains. Forests, herds, ores and springs all depend on what the high ground does. People with 戊 are often the ones on whom many others quietly depend, and the line suggests that this is the stem's real work.

Water and Fire (水潤物生, 火燥物病). A mountain with rain on it grows a forest. A mountain baked and bare grows nothing. In a person the question of moisture becomes a question of temperament: whether there is some softness, some water, some kindness flowing through the stone. Ren Tieqiao adds the other half of the rule. A mountain born in spring or summer, when Fire is strong, wants Water; one born in autumn or winter, already full of Water, wants Fire to warm it, or the soaked ground falls ill in its own way. We come back to this in the chapters on the Ten Gods and the seasons.

The north-east and south-west corners (艮坤). The old compass names eight directions with the eight trigrams. 艮 (gèn) is the mountain trigram and sits in the north-east, the corner the commentators tie to the branch 寅. 坤 (kūn) is the earth trigram and sits in the south-west, the corner of the branch 申. The line says that Earth in these two corners dislikes being struck and prefers calm. The two classic readings differ a little. The old note takes it as 戊 sitting on 寅 or on 申, and adds that each of the two fears the other, since 寅 and 申 clash. Ren Tieqiao reads it first as a birth in the 寅 or 申 month, when spring Wood presses the mountain or autumn Metal drains it, and then extends the same warning to a 戊 seated on those branches. Chapter 9 gives both pillars a section of their own.

The wall beside the mountain

The website calls 戊 the mountain. Here a second picture stands next to it, since a single picture flatters too easily.

The wall needs a word of honesty first, and in the end so does the mountain. Older manuals such as the 淵海子平, the Deep Sea of Ziping, do picture 戊 as the earth of city walls and dykes. The notes printed with the verse above disagree: 戊, they say, is the earth of hills and ridges, high, thick and dry, the source of the softer soil of 己, and city walls are not what the verse means. Ren Tieqiao goes further. He lists the familiar likenesses of the ten stems, 戊 as a city wall among them, and calls it a great error (大謬) to read a chart as if a stem were the object it is compared to; for him a stem is a manner of Yang firmness or Yin softness. So both pictures in this book are teaching images. The mountain is the one the old notes accept, the wall is our own picture of what a person makes of the mountain, and neither is a definition of 戊 or a rule for reading a chart.

A mountain is what the land did on its own. It stands apart, it is vast, and it does not ask whether anyone likes the view. A wall is the same earth after someone has decided what it is for. Soil is dug, stone is hauled, layers are packed down in frames and left to set; and the result is a line that says: inside here is the town, outside there is the weather. A wall has a mason. It has a gate, a gatekeeper and hours of opening. It has a left side and a right side, and it shelters the people on one of them.

Growing up as 戊 often means walking from the first image to the second. At the start you find the mountain: large, silent, self-contained, trusted from a distance and known by almost nobody. The wall is where 戊 matures: the same weight, now arranged to protect something chosen, with a gate that the person decides how to use. Whenever the next chapters talk about strength and what it costs, two questions return. Who is the mason of this wall? And where is the gate?

The mature wall is easy to recognise in daily life. It shows in the person who says "the office is open until four, and after four I am not available", and says it so evenly that nobody takes offence. It shows in the parent who keeps one rule through a whole childhood and is thanked for it at forty. It shows in the colleague whose door is shut on Tuesday mornings, and whose door is then really open on Tuesday afternoons. A wall is a decision that has been made once and can be relied on.

Neither picture is better. A mountain with no wall is magnificent and cold and nobody lives on it. A wall with no mountain behind it is a fortification with nothing to defend. Readers with 戊 usually need to hold both.

Where 戊 sits among the elements

The five elements nourish one another in one circle and hold one another in check in another. Standing on 戊 and looking out, the neighbours are arranged like this:

The naming rule is short. Within each element, the stem that shares 戊's polarity takes the Friend, Eating God, Seven Killings or "indirect" name; the stem of opposite polarity takes the Rob Wealth, Hurting Officer or "direct" name. Hence 庚, Yang like 戊, is the Eating God, while its Yin sister 辛 is the Hurting Officer, and 甲 (Yang Wood) is the Seven Killings while 乙 (Yin Wood) is the Direct Officer. Chapter 3 grows out of this table, and the rule above gives each of its names.

Four readers

Four made-up people walk through the book from here to the last page. Each of them has 戊 for a Day Master, and the four were born in four different seasons. Two more, Valentina and Boon Seng, appear in the scenes of Chapter 2, and their charts are set out in Chapter 9. Every chart below is cast on the solar calendar.

Each column reads downward from year to hour, the same order in which the bazi.cards calculator sets out the four pillars from left to right. The Day Master is the 戊 in bold, and the branch that goes with it, the day branch, is where home and the closest partner are found.

For now, notice only the weather. Stavros has a forest in his branches, a full Wood union with a 寅 beside it, pressing on a single 戊. Hamza's summer is full of Fire, and Water stands at both ends of his chart, in the year and in the hour. Annika carries two 戊 and one 癸, and 戊 and 癸 are a pair of stems drawn toward each other. Selamawit's winter is cold and wet, and the year pillar 丙午 at the far end holds the only Fire. These four mountains are very different, and under the same rules they will behave differently.

A scene: the wall at ten to seven

Stavros is forty-seven and teaches mathematics in a school in Thessaloniki. On most Saturdays in October he is somewhere else: in his grandfather's village in Epirus, where a dry-stone terrace wall has been slumping into the olive grove for eleven years. He arrives before the cold lifts. By ten to seven he is on his knees with a crowbar and a wheelbarrow, sorting stone by size, not talking to anyone. His cousin arrives with coffee and stands about for a while. Stavros nods without looking up. By noon the wall is two courses higher, and he says, perhaps, three sentences.

Nothing in this picture is cold. He is happy, and the cousin knows it. The mountain draws itself together when it works, and the work is its kind of speech.

On Monday morning a colleague asks him in the corridor why the timetable for the third-year classes has changed. He listens to the whole question. He thinks. He walks away. Forty minutes later the colleague finds a note on her desk with the new timetable, a short reason, and an offer to swap the afternoon duty. She says to a friend that Stavros takes a long time to answer and is always right when he does.

The wall and the mountain are in the same man. The next chapter asks what each costs him.

What this book will not do

There are no forecasts in these pages. The Ziping school gives us a vocabulary for the climate around a person, for what is present, what leans on what and what steadies it, and a climate is not a diary of coming events. Words like "often", "usually" and "the chart leans" appear throughout, and each one is there on purpose.

Nor will it advise you on health, money or the law. Where those subjects come up, the book offers pictures and questions, and any real decision belongs with a qualified professional.

What it can offer is a plain mirror. Meeting one's stem can bring a kind of relief: a trait one had counted as a flaw is simply named, without fuss. The slowness, the silence, the refusal to be hurried, the sheer size of a decision once it is taken. Should that happen to you, pay attention. The old authors placed 戊 in the middle of their picture of the world, and it was not a courtesy.