The Vine and the Trellis

The character

乙 (yǐ) comes second in the sequence of ten heavenly stems: Wood, Yin in polarity, paired with 甲 (jiǎ), the Yang Wood before it. The old way to tell the pair apart is by size and posture. 甲 is the tree: one trunk, one direction, a crown that wants the sky. 乙 is everything else that lives by growing. Grass between paving stones, a rose on a wall, wisteria, bean runners, a bindweed that has found the drainpipe, orchids on a branch, the green shoot that comes up through a crack in a car park.

A tree argues with the wind by standing still. 乙 argues with it by bending, and by being somewhere else the next morning. That is the first fact to hold about this Day Master. Its strength is real, though it never looks like strength. Nobody photographs a vine and says "what power". Then the vine has covered the shed.

The verse

Each stem has a short verse in the Dī Tiān Suǐ (滴天髓, "Drip of Heaven's Marrow"), one of the classical texts most often quoted on the subject. The one for 乙 has eight phrases of four characters, set here two to a line. They follow as printed in the annotated edition of Ren Tieqiao (任鐵樵), the 滴天髓闡微, in a translation of our own.

乙木雖柔，刲羊解牛。 懷丁抱丙，跨鳳乘猴。 虛濕之地，騎馬亦憂。 藤蘿繫甲，可春可秋。

Yi wood is soft, and still it can slaughter the sheep and carve up the ox. Holding Ding to its breast and Bing in its arms, it can mount the phoenix and ride the monkey. On hollow, soaked ground, even a horse to ride is a worry. A vine tied to Jia can stand in spring and stand in autumn.

Now the lines in plain words, one at a time. The first line is a contrast on purpose: soft, and still able to cut. In the animal code of the branches, the sheep is 未 and the ox is 丑, two Earth branches. The old note printed under the verse explains how a soft stem can manage them: 丑 and 未 are Yin Earth, the softer kind, so a 乙 that sits on them can master its ground the way a butcher's knife masters a carcass. Ren Tieqiao gives a second reason in his commentary. He reads the line as a 乙 born in a 丑 or 未 month, or on a 乙丑 or 乙未 day: 未 is the storehouse of Wood, where the plant can coil its roots, and 丑 is damp soil that keeps it fed. Either way the line describes a strength out of proportion to the look of the thing.

The second line brings the two Fire stems. 丁 is the lamp and 丙 is the sun; holding them close is the plant turned toward light. The phoenix is the branch 酉 and the monkey is 申, the two Metal branches of autumn. The old note says that with even one 丙 or 丁 a 乙 born in a 申 or 酉 month need not fear the Metal, and Ren Tieqiao applies the line to the 乙酉 day as well, provided the Fire shows on the stems. A plant with light in its arms can treat Metal as a mount, where a plant in the dark meets Metal as a blade. The season manual of Chapter 8 gives the same advice for most of autumn: look for Fire first. The other old edition of the text, the 滴天髓輯要, writes 跨雞, "mount the rooster", where Ren's has the phoenix; both name the branch 酉, so the sense is unchanged.

The third line is the warning. Ground that is hollow and wet cannot hold a root, and then even the horse (午, the branch of Fire) is no help, because the plant is afloat. Too much Water, and the vine drifts. The commentators differ in the detail. The old note speaks of a 乙 born in the 子 month with Water stems showing. Ren Tieqiao widens it to the 亥 and 子 months when the chart has no 丙 or 丁 and no dry Earth, and he places the horse in the year branch; a 乙 day can never sit on 午 itself, since a Yin stem only stands on a Yin branch. The picture is easy enough to hold.

The fourth line gives the book its title. A vine tied to 甲, the great tree, is a vine with a frame. With a frame it stands in spring, when Wood is at its height, and in autumn, when Metal comes for it. The old note pictures a chart with many 甲 and 寅, the younger sibling following the elder, a vine on a tall tree that no longer fears the axe. Ren Tieqiao reads "spring or autumn" as any season at all. The text names a tree. The cover of this book shows a bamboo trellis, and the idea is the same: a support, and one chosen on purpose.

The vine that climbs anything

The first picture is the vine in its young form, and it is the more familiar one. It goes where there is something to hold. A fence, a neighbour, an ally, a plan, a mood in the room. This is the Yi that reads people quickly because it has to: the first job of a climbing plant is to find out what will bear weight. It is flexible, quick to learn a new house, and so fine in its reach that others only notice after the fact that it has been there all along.

It is also the Yi that holds on to whatever it finds first. The old texts do not say that every support is a good one. A vine will grip a rotten post with the same zeal as a sound one, and a vine tied to the wrong thing can be pulled down with it.

The vine on a trellis, in flower

The second picture is the same plant after it has chosen. A trellis is a frame made for a vine, with the gaps cut to the width of its stem. The plant on it has direction, light on its leaves and room to flower, and what it gives in return is the whole reason anyone builds a trellis: a wall of green and bloom where there was a blank board.

Much of the life of 乙 runs between the two pictures. The first is where this Day Master starts: clever at clinging, good at adjusting, and kept on edge by its own nerves. The second is where it can arrive, after some years: the same suppleness, given a structure of its own choosing. Whether the pages turn to strength, to work, to partners or to the seasons, one question stays underneath. What is the vine holding on to, and did it choose it?

Neither picture is the better one. A vine that never holds anything lies on the ground and gets trodden on. A trellis with no vine is two crossed sticks. Most people born on a 乙 day need the reach and the frame together.

Both pictures are teaching images, and the old commentators would insist on it. Ren Tieqiao complains that fortune-tellers' rhymes had turned 甲 into roof beams and 乙 into flowers and fruit, and he calls judging a chart by such pictures 大謬, a great error. The vine and the trellis serve here in that spirit: as pictures of a temperament, and never as a definition of the stem.

Where 乙 sits among the elements

The five elements feed and hold each other in check, and the table below follows that cycle with the vine at the centre. Reading outward from 乙, the relations come out like this.

A detail that trips people up. Because 乙 is Yin, a Yin stem of another element carries the "indirect", "friend" or "eating" name, and a Yang stem of that element carries the "direct", "rob" or "hurting" one. So the Yin Metal 辛 is the Seven Killings and the Yang Metal 庚 is the Direct Officer. Yin Fire 丁 is the Eating God and Yang Fire 丙 is the Hurting Officer. The ten names of Chapter 3 all come from this grid, and so does the name of any stem that turns up later, whether in a chart, a Luck Pillar or a year.

Four readers

Four made-up readers share the book with you. Each has 乙 as the Day Master, each was born in a different season, and each chart was cast by the solar calendar, not the lunar one. Chapter 9 brings in two more.

The bold 乙 marks the Day Master. Beneath it hangs the day branch, which is the root of the plant: home, and the person nearest to you. At this stage only the general feel of each chart counts. Solène's is crowded with Wood and has one Metal stem standing at her hour. Minh's is hot, Fire on every side of a Wood that has no Water at all to drink. Yaw's is almost all Metal, with three Wood stems like three saplings in a quarry. Ximena's is a cold chart with Metal on top and Water underneath. Four vines, four gardens: the same rules will play out differently in each as the chapters go on.

A scene: two mornings

At twenty to seven in Lyon, Solène puts the kettle on and, while it heats, turns the pots on her kitchen windowsill a quarter turn toward the glass. A jasmine, two geraniums and a vanilla orchid she has been told is not possible in this climate. She is forty-eight and works in the conservation lab of the municipal library, where she mends the torn edges of eighteenth-century letters with tissue so thin it is nearly a breath. She finds the way into any room easily. Her sister says she could befriend a locked door. On the tram she already knows, from the set of two colleagues' shoulders, which meeting will be tense.

On a November morning in Da Nang, far to the east, Minh sits in a site office with a flask of tea and a calendar of road repairs. He is fifty-two and has spent twenty-eight years on bridges and drains for the city roads department. He does not announce an opinion in meetings. He rewrites the schedule so that each of three quarrelling contractors believes the new order was their own idea, and by Friday the bridge has a date. Afterwards he cannot say what he did.

Both would answer, if asked, that they are not doing anything special. A vine never feels like it is climbing. It feels like the next inch.

What this book will not do

Nothing in these pages predicts your future. In the Ziping school BaZi is closer to a gardener's notebook about a plot: what grows there, which way it leans, which wall gives shelter. Dates of events are not part of it. Where the text says "often", "usually" or "the chart leans", read exactly that, and nothing firmer.

Health, money and law are not its business either. When the chapters touch them they hold up a picture and ask a question; whatever you then do about it is a matter for a doctor, an adviser or a lawyer who knows your case.

What it offers is a plain mirror. Readers of this stem may feel relief first: the habit of bending, which they have apologised for over the years, is described without blame. Should you feel that, pay attention to it. The old authors wrote a line about butchering sheep and dividing oxen for this soft stem, and manners were not what they were praising.