Earthly Branch · Mǎo
Mǎo (卯)
full spring growth — pure soft Wood, lush, fast, everywhere at once
- Zodiac correspondence:
- Rabbit
- Element:
- Wood
- Season:
- mid spring
- Hours:
- 05:00–07:00
- Lunar month:
- the 2nd lunar month
- Hidden stems:
- Yin Wood (乙)
The fourth Earthly Branch — mid spring, pure soft Wood. Its zodiac animal is the Rabbit.
Overview
Mao (卯) is the fourth Earthly Branch, and the distinction is the same: Mao is the branch; the Rabbit is the popular Chinese-zodiac animal that corresponds to it. Mao is not 'the Rabbit' — it is Mao, a calendrical unit, with the Rabbit as its familiar label.
As a branch, Mao is the peak of spring growth — the 2nd lunar month, sunrise, the season at its lushest and fastest. Its element is pure soft Wood: not the rising surge of early spring but the full, spreading green of mid-season. Like Zi and You, it is a 'cardinal' branch that holds an element at its purest.
As a unit of time
As time, Mao rules 05:00–07:00 (the 卯時 double-hour), the 2nd lunar month at spring's height, and due east. Its pillar placement fixes which layer of the chart this full-spring Wood colours.
Hidden stems (藏干)
Mao hides a single stem (藏干): Yin Wood (乙). Like Zi, it is one of the pure branches — one unmixed hidden stem — which is why Mao reads as concentrated, soft, pervasive Wood with no other element buried to complicate it.
Clashes, trinities, combinations
Mao's clash (六沖) is with You (酉, the Rooster) — the Wood-against-Metal, spring-against-autumn axis. It is the centre and strongest member of the Wood trinity (三合) 亥卯未 (Hai–Mao–Wei), and its six-combination (六合) is with Xu (戌, the Dog), the pair combining toward Fire. These are structural ties between chart positions, not event forecasts.
Cross-system reference
| System | Closest archetype | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Zi Wei Dou Shu | One of the twelve fixed cells of a Zi Wei chart — the 卯 position a palace sits on | In Zi Wei the twelve Earthly Branches are the chart's twelve fixed cells: every palace occupies a branch, and a chart's 命宮 (Life Palace) can land on 卯. Its Bazi clash partner 酉 (Rooster) sits in the cell directly opposite — what Zi Wei reads as the 對宮 (opposite palace) on the same axis. Same twelve branches, used as the spatial frame for the palaces, not as a Bazi pillar. |
| Chinese zodiac (生肖) | The Rabbit — the popular animal label for the branch Mao | The Rabbit is the everyday zodiac's name for Mao; the branch Mao — its pure Wood, time and interactions — is the technical unit a Bazi chart reads. |
| Western astrology | A loose structural parallel only — twelve divisions of a cycle | No sign maps to a branch; the branches are calendrical, not personality signs. The only parallel is the shared twelve-fold division. |
The Chinese zodiac animal is a popular label for the branch, not the branch itself, and there is no branch-to-Western-sign mapping. Cross-system anchors are a loose heuristic; an Earthly Branch is a calendrical unit with hidden stems, which neither the zodiac nor Western astrology shares.
Reading this descriptively
Mao describes a position in time and its elemental character — mid-spring pure Wood — not a personality, not a destiny, and not 'you are a Rabbit'. It is read against the rest of the chart, and the same branch plays out very differently across different lives.
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