Bing

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.

Every stem has a partner among the other nine, and the five pairings, called the combinations of the heavenly stems, are fixed: each stem combines with the one five places away from it. Bing pairs with Xin, and the tradition holds that a combined pair takes on a phase of its own distinct from either stem's native phase. The pairing is used in almanac work and in fate calculation, where a combination in a chart is read as a binding between the two positions that carry it.

The ten stems are older than the sexagenary cycle they now form half of. On the Shang oracle bones of the second millennium BCE they name the ten days of the xun, the Shang week, and Shang kings are known to history by posthumous names built on them, so a stem was a unit of the working calendar before it was a term of cosmological art. The five-phase and yin-yang readings attached to the stems are later, systematised under the Han, and the atlas records the two layers as two layers.

Bing is yang Fire and the conventional image is the sun itself, open and unconcealed, against the lamp or candle of Ding. Fire in the five-phase scheme is generated by Wood and generates Earth, and it overcomes Metal, so a stem's phase places it within two cycles of relation, generation and conquest, that govern how the almanac reads any combination it enters.

The stem's own attributes here are Fire and yang polarity. Those two facts fix its place in the run of ten, since the stems proceed through the five phases in generation order taking the yang member first and the yin member second, and they fix how it is read wherever it appears, in the year, the month, the day or the double hour of a Four Pillars chart.

Sources Chinese Mathematical Astrology: Reaching Out to the StarsHo Peng Yoke with The Chinese Sexagenary Cycle and the Ritual Origins of the CalendarAdam Smith