Shann5/bazi-nayin

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.

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

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. The same character 金 splits into two English words: 海中金 / 沙中金 are gold; 剑锋金 (sword-edge) stays metal.
3. 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-nayin
• 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-nayin},
  note   = {CC BY 4.0}
}