What Is Great Forest Wood (Da Lin Mu)?
In a Nutshell
The NaYin of the Wu Chen and Ji Si stem-branches: branches shaking in the wind, boughs holding up the moon — the image of a great forest.
Quick facts
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Stem-branches | Wu Chen, Ji Si |
| NaYin element | Wood |
| Signature image | Branches shaking in the wind, boughs propping up the moon |
What is Great Forest Wood?
Great Forest Wood is one of the thirty NaYin (Melodic Elements) groups of the sexagenary cycle, covering the two stem-branches Wu Chen and Ji Si. The sixty stem-branches are taken two at a time, in order, forming thirty groups; each group has its own NaYin name — and as a rule, the name's final word is the group's NaYin element. The Wu Chen–Ji Si group is called "Great Forest Wood."
Note that a NaYin's element often differs from the elements of its own stem and branch. Here, the stem Wu is Earth and the branch Chen is Earth, yet the NaYin is Wood — check the chart rather than assuming.
"Great forest" fixes the image: not a single sapling but a sweeping forest. The *San Ming Tong Hui* glosses it as "branches shaking in the wind, boughs propping up the moon": limbs swaying in the gale, branches spreading wide enough to cover the moon — the bearing of towering trees. (Note: an earlier draft of this wiki wrote "propping up the sun"; it has been corrected to "moon" against published editions and multiple transcribed copies — the phrase "shielding the sun" already appears later in the same passage, so "moon" completes the sun–moon pairing of the parallel prose.)
How to look it up: match the stem-branch of your Year Pillar or Day Pillar against the NaYin chart. For example, 1988 was a Wu Chen year and 1989 a Ji Si year, so anyone born in those years carries Great Forest Wood as their Year Pillar NaYin; a Wu Chen or Ji Si Day Pillar works the same way. MoZhu's built-in NaYin lookup tool lists the NaYin of all Four Pillars automatically from a birth time.
Since the Song dynasty, the Zi Ping school centers on the Day Master and NaYin mostly serves as auxiliary reference. Names like Great Forest Wood are essentially the ancients' set of evocative nicknames for stem-branch pairs; understanding the imagery helps you read classical texts, but nothing should be inferred from the name alone. This page is for study and reference only.
Classical sources
"Branches shaking in the wind, boughs propping up the moon."
(Rendered from the classical Chinese original.)
Source: *San Ming Tong Hui* (Comprehensive Treatise on the Three Destinies), Book 1, *Lun Wu Xing* (On the Five Elements — the section on Wood)
Plain-language reading: Great Forest Wood takes the image of a great forest — branches swaying in the wind, boughs spreading to cover the moon: the bearing of towering trees. (Corrected from "sun" to "moon" against the base text, as noted above.)
*For entertainment purposes only.*