Yin Wood over Earth · Gold in the sea

Yi Chou — pillar 2 of 60

A vine on cold, wet ground. Nothing comes easily, and everything that grows here grows by patience rather than speed.

Reviewed November 2026

← All sixty pillars

Pillar乙丑 — Yi Chou (2 of 60)
StemYi 乙 — Yin Wood
BranchChou 丑 — the Ox, Earth
Hidden stemsJi 己, Gui 癸, Xin 辛
StageDecline (6 of 12)
NayinGold in the sea
RelationStem controls the branch

What the pair is doing

The stem restrains the branch's element — the wealth relation. What the person manages, earns from, or has to handle with effort.

The stem is yin wood and the branch is earth, so this is the wealth relation. Inside the branch sit the hidden stems Ji, Gui, Xin — which is why a Chou branch is never only earth. Those hidden stems are what a reader checks when the surface element does not explain what the chart is doing.

The stage: Decline

On the twelve-stage cycle, Yi meets Chou at Decline — stage 6 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. Decline 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 Yi Chou. In the current window that means 1925, 1985, 2045. 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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