地支 · Mǎo
Mǎo卯
full spring growth — pure soft Wood, lush, fast, everywhere at once
The fourth Earthly Branch — mid spring, pure soft Wood. Its zodiac animal is the Rabbit.
01概覽
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.
02作為時間單位
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.
03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.
04六沖、三合、六合
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.
05跨系統對照
| 系統 | 最近的原型 | 備註 |
|---|---|---|
| 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 (Self 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. |
生肖動物只是地支的通俗別名、不是地支本身，地支與西方星座之間也沒有對應。跨系統對照只是鬆散參考；地支是帶藏干的曆法單位，這個結構生肖與西方占星都沒有。
06以描述而非預言來讀
常見問題
What is the Mǎo Earthly Branch (卯) in BaZi?
The fourth Earthly Branch — mid spring, pure soft Wood. Its zodiac animal is the Rabbit.
Is the Mǎo Earthly Branch the same as the zodiac animal?
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.