Mao

Mountain 8 of the twenty-four mountains (luopan) is Mao, the Earthly Branch also carried in the Chinese zodiac as the Rabbit, occupying position E2, due east, 82.5 to 97.5 degrees. Mao is a yin branch whose fixed agent is Wood, and it is a pure cardinal branch: within it the sexagenary system stores a single hidden stem, Yi, yin Wood, so its concealed qi and its surface agree. In the trine groupings that gather the twelve branches into four three-branch sets, one for each of the four elemental phases, Mao functions as the cardinal Wood branch, anchoring the Wood trine it forms with Hai and Wei.

Twelve of the ring's twenty-four positions are branches rather than stems or trigrams, and they are the only ring of the three that also carries a fixed two-hour span of the traditional Chinese day, Mao's own double-hour, and a solar month, so a branch mountain names a direction, a time of day and a season in one and the same character, a triple duty neither the stem ring nor the trigram positions carry. Because ten stems and twelve branches do not share a common factor larger than two, a given stem does not return to a given branch until the combination has cycled sixty times, the sexagenary count (jiazi) that names years, months, days and hours across the traditional Chinese calendar; a mountain's own stem or branch name is therefore also, in a different context entirely, a recurring building block of that sixty-term cycle.

Mao sits directly opposite mountain 20, You, twelve positions and a hundred and eighty degrees around the ring: in compass school feng shui a building or a grave is described by this sitting-and-facing pair, the back set toward Mao and the front opened toward You, and Stephen Skinner's account of the luopan treats the correct reading of a sitting-facing pair as the compass's most basic function, prior to any of the finer rings layered around it. The twenty-four mountain ring itself interleaves three different kinds of position at fifteen degrees each, twelve Earthly Branches, eight Heavenly Stems and four corner trigrams, and Mao belongs to the branch layer, the oldest and most complete of the three, present at every one of the twelve thirty-degree sectors the ring divides the circle into.

Mao's own due-cardinal position is also, in the Later Heaven Bagua arrangement recorded separately in this atlas, associated with one of the four cardinal trigrams, Zhen (Wood), though the ring inscribes only the branch glyph at that point rather than duplicating the trigram beside it. Compass school practice treats the fifteen-degree seam between one mountain and its neighbour as a genuine hazard rather than a rounding error: a sitting or facing line falling exactly on that boundary, called an empty or straddling line, is read as drawing on the qi of both adjacent mountains at once rather than cleanly on one, and Stephen Skinner's account of the luopan treats avoiding a seam-line reading as one of the instrument's basic disciplines, checked before any of the finer rings above the twenty-four mountains are consulted at all.