Metal: drawing in, forging, Yang and Yin Metal

The element that draws in

Wood grows, Fire disperses, Water flows, and Metal draws in. In the Sanming Tonghui (三命通会), the Ming-era fate manual, the word given for Metal means "to hold back".

Open the full-size diagram

Relation sketch: the elements run in controlling order and every arrow is a control; the two neighbors of Metal are colored, and its stems and branches follow this site's usual entry-level tables.

This picture uses a different order: not the generating cycle but the controlling one. Metal controls Wood, Wood controls Earth, Earth controls Water, Water controls Fire and Fire controls Metal, and following the arrows once round brings you back to Metal. Metal is at the top; the purple Fire beside it controls Metal and the green Wood is what Metal controls. Metal takes the stems Yang Metal (庚) and Yin Metal (辛) and the branches Monkey (申) and Rooster (酉). For the structure of all the lines, see the generating and controlling cycles.

Metal rules the west and answers to autumn. The word metal means to hold back: yin qi begins to restrain the ten thousand things and draw them in. Sifting sand to pick out gold, it is born of Earth, yet born of Earth it is set apart from Earth: that is its natural form.

"To hold back" says that in autumn yin qi begins to check things and pull them in. "Sifting sand for gold" says that Metal has to be picked out of sand: it is born of Earth yet is separate from it and is no longer Earth. The book also places Metal in the west and in autumn, with four as its number (nine once complete) and white as its color.

Extreme yin as body, the essence of yang within

Why should something that draws in be hard? The five-elements chapter explains Metal this way:

Metal takes the extreme yin as its body, yet inside it holds the essence of extreme yang, and so it is hard and unlike other things. Were it yin alone and not hard it would be ice and snow, which melts on meeting yang. So Metal that is not refined does not become a vessel.

The body of Metal is yin, but it holds a core of yang, which is why it is both hard and unlike anything else. With yin alone and none of that yang, you would have ice and snow, which melt at the first heat. So Metal has to be refined before it becomes a vessel. Master Zhang (Zhang Zai) adds one more word on Metal: "following and changing" (从革), meaning that Metal follows the hand of the maker, changes shape, and cannot go back once it has.

Fire before the vessel and after it: two roles

By the controlling cycle Fire controls Metal, which makes Fire look like the enemy. The same passage goes on:

Fire here is no fixed hero or villain: before the Metal is formed it is the forge, and after the vessel is made it has no more use. The book says the same of autumn Metal: "Autumn Metal holds the rule and the command; fire comes to forge it and it becomes the stuff of bells and cauldrons." In autumn Metal is in charge, Fire forges it, and what comes out is bells and cauldrons.

Yang Metal is steel, Yin Metal is mountain ore

The book's section on the stems writes two Metals. Yang Metal (庚) is "in the sky wind and frost, on the earth metal and iron", called yang metal, blunt and hard, "forged by fire into a vessel"; the book shows it with the furnace fire in the Snake forging Yang Metal into bells and cauldrons. For Yin Metal (辛) the heavenly image is the sun and moon and the earthly image is metal, "the metal being the ore of mountain and stone"; it is called yin or soft metal, "moist, not blunt and hard", and it is hurt by blazing forging; it suits Water and Earth to support it.

Look at the last two rows. Yang Metal has Growth at the Snake, where Yin Metal dies; Yin Metal has Growth at the Rat, where Yang Metal dies. The two stems swap Growth and Death. The book is specific: at the Rat Yang Metal meets "cold metal and cold water, the mother weak and the child strong" and so is "metal sunk under water"; at the Snake Yin Metal is buried by the Earth inside the Snake, "heavy Earth buries Metal". One more point: in another chapter, on the heavenly images of the ten stems, the same book likens Yang Metal to the moon and Yin Metal to frost, which differs from the images above. There is more than one set of images; to follow all twelve stages, open the twelve-stage and void-branch article.

Monkey, Rooster, and three more branches that hide Metal

This site's table gives Metal the Monkey (申) and Rooster (酉) branches. The book calls the Monkey "the place where Water and Earth are born" and its Metal blunt and hard, "unlike soft pearls and jade"; the Rooster belongs to the eighth month, when "the metal is white and the water runs clear". Beyond those two, this site's hidden-stem table puts Yang Metal in the Snake and Yin Metal in the Dog and the Ox.

The Snake deserves a second look: it is a Fire branch, yet it hides Yang Metal and is where Yang Metal has Growth. The book writes that Yang Metal "has Growth at the Snake, where the Earth inside the Snake can generate it", and also that "the Snake is the furnace fire that forges Yang Metal into a vessel of bells and cauldrons". One Snake is both the birthplace of Yang Metal and the furnace that forges it. For the division of labor among the three layers, compare how hidden stems unfold.

Three conditions: too hard, too weak, too strong

Metal turns up three times in the run of sayings the book quotes from Xu Dasheng: once against an opponent that is too hard, twice when its own strength is off:

Set against the "forging" above, the same Fire here has become "melting". The book's test for forging or melting lies not in the Fire but in the Metal itself: whether it has become a vessel and whether it is strong enough.

Two cases to test the Metal reading

The element before Metal is Earth and the one after is Water.