Seeking the Balance
SanCai 三才/ Trinity
Happy YiSi 乙巳 2025, the Year of the Yin Wood Snake 🐍!
Three New Years, Each Year
According to the Daoist tradition, this Year of the Snake officially began with LiChun 立春, Spring Establish, at 15:10 Central European time on February 3, 2025.
Many of you may notice that this day is different than Lunar New Year, which was on January 29, 2025. Actually, there are three different energetic years hidden within one GanZhi 干支, the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches calendar system.
As many of you remember, LiChun is the starting point of the Daoist Solar New Year / the yearly animal sign. It also marks the starting point of the spring season.
The Lunar New Year always falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice.
The third new year is the hidden cosmological calendar, which starts on DaHan 大寒, the day of Major Cold, which falls around January 20th each year.
The calendars of these three different years have been held within the same GanZhi 干支 calendar for thousands of years. They follow the Daoist trinity philosophy.
SanCai 三才 — Trinity
Daoist numerology, the number three represents creation, accomplishment, the beginning of postnatal life, and SanCai 三才. SanCai literally means three materials or three within one. With respect to Daoist philosophy it means trinity, and every object, phenomenon, or event in the Universe is the sum of three parts. Each of these components is also made of three components (subcomponents, if you will), ad infinitum.
As with the three years within one calendar, in the Daoist cultivation system understanding the trinities within your body is a must. It is especially important to understand the components and subcomponents I have listed for you in the chart1 below:
Table 1. The Trinity of the Body, from XinYi WuDao, by Master Zhongxian Wu
The YinYang 陰陽 Factors of SanCai
SanCai represents any and every thing that exists in the Universe. From the Daoist trinity perspective, we could always find three parts within one thing or an event: Yin 陰, Yang 陽, and the interaction between these Yin and Yang, which is the balance point.
It is the same with our calendar system. As I mentioned in the first section of this article, the regular traditional Daoist calendar has three parts: Solar Year Calendar (the Yang calendar), Lunar Year Calendar (the Yin Calendar), and the Cosmological Calendar, the calendar which shows not only how Yin and Yang interact with each other but also how this interaction creates the cosmological year. This is the best calendar to use when we are seeking to align ourselves with the every changing balance point.
For instance, the dramatic alternating weather, vacillating between Yin-cold and Yang-hot will be the typical pattern in this coming Snake year, with stronger windstorms than we experienced last year. This weather pattern suggests that the world is on a continued trajectory of a pretty choppy period. As with the recent few years, some of us are still susceptible to becoming trapped in a ShuiShenHuoRe 水深火熱 situation.
What is ShuiShenHuoRe? ShuiShenHuoRe literally means one being under deep water or being within a burning fire. It is a phrase we commonly apply when life feels extremely harsh. Being in dire straights might be a comparable English usage.
Seeking the Balance
Figure 1. A meandering path through the mudflats (photo credit www.livenowfox.com)
Understanding the YinYang factors of our personal trinity, especially the balance point, will help us figure out our most direct way to healing, happiness, and harmony. For example, as some of you may remember from my previous writing, I often walked through mudflats with my bare feet as a child. It was very easy to become trapped in the mud. I learned that the more you struggle against the mud, the more trapped you become. Finding the balance point meant slowly assessing the location of my foot with each step, and never putting full body weight in the mud unless I felt some solid support under me. Instead of charging forward down the same path, in the same way and risk getting trapped, or making a challenging situation worse by fighting against nature, (ShuiShenHuoRe), I needed to find my way to the YinYang interaction point between hard and soft in order to safely get to my destination.
From the perspective of the annual balance point, this year we are presented with a unique opportunity ride the Snake Qi, improving our inner strength and flexibility so that we can walk through our zigzag path and maneuver around the various obstacles we find in our daily lives, in our healing process, and in our spiritual transformation. For this reason, I have scheduled many snake/serpent related Qigong classes and events for the coming year, with both online and in person options. For details, please visit my website events page at www.Chinese Wisdom Traditions.com.
XinYi WuDao: Heart-Mind – The Dao of Martial Arts. London: Singing Dragon, 2014.