Datasets:

Shann5
/

bazi-nayin

license: cc-by-4.0
language:
  - en
  - zh
pretty_name: The 30 Nayin (纳音) — English Translations and Classical Relations
size_categories:
  - n<1K
task_categories:
  - translation
tags:
  - chinese
  - glossary
  - terminology
  - chinese-metaphysics
  - bazi
  - four-pillars
  - nayin
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files: nayin.csv
  - config_name: pillars
    data_files: v2/pillars.csv
  - config_name: meetings
    data_files: v2/matrix.long.csv

The Thirty Nayin (纳音) — English Translations

The nayin (纳音, nà yīn, "received tones") are thirty poetic sound-images from Chinese metaphysics. Each 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 sources render these names inconsistently: the same nayin turns up as three or four different English strings across sites, which makes the terms impossible to join or cross-reference. This dataset is one carefully considered rendering, published with the reasoning behind each choice so it can be argued with.

v2 — classical readings (configs `pillars` and `meetings`)

Structured from volume 1 of the Sānmìng Tōnghuì (三命通會, Ming dynasty, Siku Quanshu edition on Wikisource), in the original Chinese. Every relation carries a verbatim quote; classical/verify.py on GitHub checks all 750 against the source text. English readings of these pillars and meetings are on auspiceoracle.com.

from datasets import load_dataset
pillars  = load_dataset("Shann5/bazi-nayin", "pillars")   # 60 rows: arc stage, image, likes, welcome/avoid/unharmed_by
meetings = load_dataset("Shann5/bazi-nayin", "meetings")  # 663 rows: subject nayin meets another → + / - / ~ / 0, with quotes

pillars: all sixty stem-branch pillars. Arc stage (the thirty images read as one life of qi, six stages), the per-pillar image and what it likes, and the stem-branch pairs or elements it welcomes, avoids, or is unharmed by.
meetings: from the thirty chapters on how each nayin fares meeting the others. verdict is + welcomes, - avoids, ~ conditional (the condition is in the quote), 0 no effect; scope is element when filled from a blanket statement ("other metals are of no use"). 663 of 900 pairings; empty pairings are absent. Relations are directional: in 41 pairs the two chapters disagree.

This records what one Ming-dynasty book says, not a claim that any of it comes true. The verdict for each quote is a curation call; the source of truth, JSON versions and the source text are on GitHub: Shann5/bazi-open-data — corrections belong there as issues.

Fields

Field	Type	Description
`hanzi`	string	Nayin name in Chinese characters (e.g. 海中金)
`pinyin`	string	Tone-marked pinyin (e.g. hǎi zhōng jīn)
`english`	string	English translation of the image (e.g. Gold in the Sea)
`element`	string	Five-Element category in Chinese (金木水火土)
`element_en`	string	Five-Element category in English
`ganzhi`	list[string]	The two stem-branch pairs this nayin covers
`ganzhi_pinyin`	list[string]	Pinyin of those two pairs

30 rows, covering all 60 stem-branch pairs. nayin.json keeps ganzhi and ganzhi_pinyin as two-element arrays; nayin.csv splits them into the columns ganzhi_1, ganzhi_2, ganzhi_1_pinyin, ganzhi_2_pinyin.

Translation principles

Keep the image, not the word order. 海中金 is "Gold in the Sea", not "Sea Middle Gold".
Say Gold when the image is refined treasure, Metal when it is raw or forged. The same character 金 splits into two English words: 海中金 / 沙中金 are gold; 剑锋金 (sword-edge) stays metal.
Use the established English term where one exists (Milky Way for 天河), and plain concrete English elsewhere.

Provenance

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. The English translations are original work.

One caveat worth stating: a nayin lookup keys off the stem-branch pillars, and those key off birth time in solar time, not clock time. Clock time can be off by more than an hour once historical DST, longitude offset from the zone's standard meridian, and the equation of time are stacked — near a two-hour branch boundary that is a different pillar and therefore a different nayin. How the correction works.

Source & canonical copy

GitHub (canonical): https://github.com/Shann5/bazi-open-data
Reference page with a prose gloss for each image: https://auspiceoracle.com/en/content/nayin

This Hugging Face repo is a mirror. Corrections go to the GitHub repo as issues.

License & citation

CC BY 4.0. Share and adapt freely, including commercially, with credit and a link.

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

@misc{auspice_bazi_nayin,
  title  = {The Thirty Nayin: English Translations},
  author = {Auspice Oracle},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://github.com/Shann5/bazi-open-data},
  note   = {CC BY 4.0}
}