Earthly branch 3 of 12
The Tiger
寅Yin
The animal is the memorable half of a pairing whose other half does the work. The branch 寅 is a position in a twelve-part cycle that names an hour, a month, a direction and a phase — and the tiger was fitted to it, not the other way round.
- Double hour03:00–04:59
- DirectionEast-northeast
- Fixed phaseWood
One position, four scales
What 寅 names
One branch marks a place in four different cycles at once. These are the same position counted in different units.
- 01
- 02
- 03
- 04
Geometry of the branch circle
Its fixed relations
Three relations are decided by position alone: the branch opposite, the branch it pairs with, and the two it forms a triangle with. None of them is a judgement about people.
Folklore of the sequence
The Tiger in the Great Race
The folk tale that explains the order of the twelve — told, as it usually is, about an order the calendar had already fixed centuries before any animal was attached to it.
Place3of 12
A powerful swimmer that fought the current the whole way across and arrived furious to find two smaller animals already there.
The twelve branches appear on Shang oracle bones, where they name days; the animals are attached to them much later. The race is how the tradition accounts for an inherited order rather than how that order came about. The full ordering legend
Five meetings in sixty years
The five Tiger pillars
A branch meets only five of the ten stems, because stems and branches advance together and their parities stay locked. That is why there are sixty pairs rather than a hundred and twenty.
Move around the circle