Bing is the third of the ten Heavenly Stems (tiangan). Its element is Fire and its polarity is yang, so Bing is glossed as yang Fire, likened in tradition to the sun or a great blaze, bright, radiant, and expansive. As one of the ten stems it combines with the twelve Earthly Branches to form the sexagenary cycle of sixty that numbers years, months, days, and double-hours in the traditional calendar. The stems run in fixed order, each carrying one of the five phases in a yang or yin form, and Bing brings the first, yang aspect of Fire after the two Wood stems. These are the conventions of the Chinese calendrical and cosmological tradition, used in the almanac and in the four-pillars method of reckoning a person's fate from the stems and branches of their birth.
Bing is the third Heavenly Stem, the first of the pair carrying the Fire phase, and as an odd-numbered stem it takes the Yang polarity, traditionally likened to the sun itself, blazing and outwardly radiant, in contrast to Ding's Yin Fire, likened to a candle or hearth flame. Bing generates the controlling cycle relationship in which Fire is checked by Water and in turn checks Metal, correspondences drawn from the same five-phase (Wu Xing) logic that underlies traditional medicine and calendrical reckoning. Within the sixty-term sexagenary cycle, Bing combines only with Yang-polarity Earthly Branches: Rat, Tiger, Dragon, Horse, Monkey and Dog. In four pillars (BaZi) astrology a Bing day master is read as warm, expressive and quick to draw attention, sometimes to the point of self-consumption, echoing the sun's own unstinting output. The stem also names the third position in enumerated Chinese lists and rankings, a use paralleling the Western convention of A, B, C.