Yang Wood over Water · Gold in the sea

Jia Zi — pillar 1 of 60

A tall tree standing in deep water: fed constantly, but never quite on dry land — a scholar's pillar, with strong roots and a long memory.

Reviewed November 2026

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Pillar甲子 — Jia Zi (1 of 60)
StemJia 甲 — Yang Wood
BranchZi 子 — the Rat, Water
Hidden stemsGui 癸
StageBath (2 of 12)
NayinGold in the sea
RelationBranch feeds the stem

What the pair is doing

The branch produces the stem's element — support that arrives from underneath, usually read as backing, learning or a source of strength.

The stem is yang wood and the branch is water, so this is the resource relation. Inside the branch sit the hidden stems Gui — which is why a Zi branch is never only water. Those hidden stems are what a reader checks when the surface element does not explain what the chart is doing.

The stage: Bath

On the twelve-stage cycle, Jia meets Zi at Bath — stage 2 of twelve. The stages run from Birth at the element's own season through Peak at its strongest, then down through Decline, Illness, Death, Tomb and Severed before Conception and Nurture bring it back. Bath is a qualitative marker, not a score: it says how freely the stem can act at this branch, not how strong the person is.

The nayin layer

The classical sound-element for this pair is gold in the sea. Nayin is a separate sixty-item list that predates the stem-and-branch reading most charts use today; it is quoted for its image rather than its arithmetic. Treat it as a second description of the same object, not as a fifth element to be balanced.

Years with this pillar

Every sixty years the year pillar returns to Jia Zi. In the current window that means 1924, 1984, 2044. If you were born in one of those years, this is your year pillar — but not necessarily your Day Master, which comes from the day, not the year.

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