The Thirty Nayin (纳音) — English Translations & Dataset

This repo holds several small BaZi datasets, each sourced and each checkable:

Dataset	Folder	What it answers
The 30 nayin (纳音)	data/, data/v2/	English names (v1); what the classical text says about all 60 pillars and about two nayin meeting (v2, in Chinese)
Hidden stems (藏干) across sources	hidden-stems/	what each branch contains, and where classical tables and engines disagree on which stem commands which days

The nayin documentation continues below.

The nayin (纳音, nà yīn, "received tones") are thirty poetic sound-images from Chinese metaphysics. Each one covers two adjacent pairs of the sixty Jiazi (六十甲子) stem-branch cycle and attaches an elemental image to them — not just Metal, but Gold in the Sea; not just Fire, but Thunderbolt Fire.

English resources for BaZi (八字, Four Pillars of Destiny) are inconsistent about these names — the same nayin gets rendered three or four different ways across sites, which makes cross-referencing painful. This repo is a small, carefully considered set of English translations, published as open data.

Translation principles

1. Keep the image, not the word order. 海中金 is "Gold in the Sea", not "Sea Middle Gold".
2. Say Gold when the image is refined treasure, Metal when it is raw or forged — 海中金 / 沙中金 are gold; 剑锋金 (sword-edge) stays metal.
3. Use the established English term where one exists (e.g. Milky Way for 天河), and plain concrete English elsewhere.

Full explanations of each image — what "Gold in the Sea" actually implies in a reading — are on the reference page this dataset comes from: The 30 Nayin, explained →

The table

Ganzhi pairs	纳音	Pinyin	English	Element
甲子·乙丑	海中金	hǎi zhōng jīn	Gold in the Sea	Metal
丙寅·丁卯	炉中火	lú zhōng huǒ	Fire in the Furnace	Fire
戊辰·己巳	大林木	dà lín mù	Great Forest Wood	Wood
庚午·辛未	路旁土	lù páng tǔ	Roadside Earth	Earth
壬申·癸酉	剑锋金	jiàn fēng jīn	Sword-Edge Metal	Metal
甲戌·乙亥	山头火	shān tóu huǒ	Hilltop Fire	Fire
丙子·丁丑	涧下水	jiàn xià shuǐ	Water in the Ravine	Water
戊寅·己卯	城头土	chéng tóu tǔ	City Wall Earth	Earth
庚辰·辛巳	白蜡金	bái là jīn	White Wax Metal	Metal
壬午·癸未	杨柳木	yáng liǔ mù	Willow Wood	Wood
甲申·乙酉	泉中水	quán zhōng shuǐ	Water in the Spring	Water
丙戌·丁亥	屋上土	wū shàng tǔ	Rooftop Earth	Earth
戊子·己丑	霹雳火	pī lì huǒ	Thunderbolt Fire	Fire
庚寅·辛卯	松柏木	sōng bǎi mù	Pine and Cypress Wood	Wood
壬辰·癸巳	长流水	cháng liú shuǐ	Long-Flowing Water	Water
甲午·乙未	沙中金	shā zhōng jīn	Gold in the Sand	Metal
丙申·丁酉	山下火	shān xià huǒ	Fire at the Foothill	Fire
戊戌·己亥	平地木	píng dì mù	Wood on Level Ground	Wood
庚子·辛丑	壁上土	bì shàng tǔ	Earth on the Wall	Earth
壬寅·癸卯	金箔金	jīn bó jīn	Gold Foil Metal	Metal
甲辰·乙巳	覆灯火	fù dēng huǒ	Sheltered Lamp Fire	Fire
丙午·丁未	天河水	tiān hé shuǐ	Water of the Milky Way	Water
戊申·己酉	大驿土	dà yì tǔ	Post-Road Earth	Earth
庚戌·辛亥	钗钏金	chāi chuàn jīn	Hairpin Metal	Metal
壬子·癸丑	桑柘木	sāng zhè mù	Mulberry Wood	Wood
甲寅·乙卯	大溪水	dà xī shuǐ	Water of the Great Stream	Water
丙辰·丁巳	沙中土	shā zhōng tǔ	Earth in the Sand	Earth
戊午·己未	天上火	tiān shàng huǒ	Fire in the Sky	Fire
庚申·辛酉	石榴木	shí liú mù	Pomegranate Wood	Wood
壬戌·癸亥	大海水	dà hǎi shuǐ	Water of the Great Sea	Water

Data

Machine-readable copies live in data/:

• nayin.json — array of 30 entries: hanzi, pinyin, english, element, element_en, ganzhi (the two stem-branch pairs), ganzhi_pinyin
• nayin.csv — same data, one row per nayin

The ganzhi→nayin pairing follows the traditional sixty Jiazi order (甲子乙丑海中金 … 壬戌癸亥大海水), cross-checked against lunar-typescript.

Also mirrored on the Hugging Face Hub, if that is where you work: huggingface.co/datasets/Shann5/bazi-nayin (load_dataset("Shann5/bazi-nayin")). This repo is the source of truth — the mirror is generated from it, and corrections belong here as issues.

v2 — what the classical text says about each pillar, and about meetings

v1 names the thirty images. v2 adds how they were read, structured from volume 1 of the Sānmìng Tōnghuì (三命通會, Ming dynasty, Siku Quanshu edition on Chinese Wikisource). The data is in the original Chinese: every relation carries a short verbatim quote, and classical/verify.py checks all 750 quotes word for word against the source text in the same folder.

data/v2/pillars.json (+ .csv) — all sixty stem-branch pillars:

Field	From the chapter	Example (甲午)
arc	論納音取象 — the thirty images read in order as one life of qi, six stages by branch pair	stage 4, 午未
image, likes	釋六十甲子性質吉凶, the per-pillar note	百煉精金 · 喜水木土
relations	the per-pillar paragraphs: welcome, avoid, unharmed_by, state, quotes	welcome 火 — 「遇火生旺其器乃成」
scale	the large absorbs small rule for same-element nayin across the four pillars	松柏木 large, 楊柳木 small

data/v2/matrix.json (+ .csv, and matrix.long.csv — one row per meeting, for pandas / datasets) — nayin × nayin, from the thirty chapters that each describe one image meeting the others. Row = the image whose chapter it is; column = the one it meets.

	meaning	share of 663 filled cells
+	welcomes (喜)	42%
~	conditional — the condition is in the quote	29%
-	avoids (忌)	18%
0	no effect (無用)	11%

Cells marked * in the CSV are filled from a blanket statement (餘金無用), not named directly. Empty cells: the text says nothing — they are left empty. nayin_en / subject_en / meets_en are the v1 English names, kept as join keys.

The relations are directional. In 41 pairs the two chapters disagree: 劒鋒金 welcomes 楊柳木 (it can cut it); 楊柳木 avoids 劒鋒金 (it gets cut).

English readings of these pillars and meetings are written up on auspiceoracle.com/en/content/nayin; this dataset stays in the original language.

What this is not. A record of what one Ming-dynasty text says, not a claim that any of it comes true. 喜 / 忌 are the text's words, reported as found. Nayin belongs to an older lineage than the day-master method most modern BaZi uses, and this table does not feed any strength calculation. Where the text contradicts itself, both readings are kept (textual_notes). The verdict for each quote is a curation call — if you read one differently, open an issue with the chapter and line.

This folder is regenerated from a private source of truth. Issues welcome; PRs that change data will be redirected to an issue.

Usage note: your input time is probably wrong

A nayin lookup keys off the stem-branch (ganzhi) pillars, and the pillars key off the birth time — in solar time, not clock time. Clock time can be off by well over an hour once you stack historical DST rules, longitude offset from the zone's standard meridian (4 min/degree; Ürümqi runs ~2 h ahead of the sun), and the equation of time (±16 min). Near a two-hour branch boundary that's the difference between two different pillars, i.e. two different nayin.

The calculator this dataset comes from corrects for all three. How the correction works, with a city-by-city table: True solar time, explained →

To see which pillars (and nayin) your own birth time lands on, with the correction applied: Free BaZi calculator →

License & attribution

Data and translations are CC BY 4.0 (SPDX: CC-BY-4.0). The full legal text is in LICENSE.

In plain terms: share and adapt them freely — in apps, articles, datasets, training corpora, commercial or not — as long as you credit the source with a link and say so if you changed anything.

Copy-paste attribution:

Nayin translations by Auspice Oracle, used under CC BY 4.0.

Copyright © 2026 Auspice Oracle (https://auspiceoracle.com).

The classical source text in classical/ is in the public domain (Ming-dynasty work, transcribed on Wikisource).