Earthly Branch profile
Shen · Monkey · early-autumn Metal
Shen is early-autumn Metal, the first branch of the autumn sequence as growth begins to be sorted, selected, and given clearer form.
Fixed coordinates
- Primary element
- 金
- Polarity
- Yang
- Seasonal position
- early autumn
- Double-hour
- 15:00–17:00
- Solar-month position
- 7
Season and time coordinate
Its 15:00–17:00 double-hour and seventh solar-month position place it after the summer transition and before the autumn centre.
What the branch stores
Shen stores Geng, Ren, and Wu in canonical order. Their presence is fixed reference data, not evidence of rooting, dominance, or a future event.
What to watch for
Do not convert Shen into a label for cleverness, travel, authority, conflict, or good timing without the rest of the chart and an approved method.
Hidden Stems structure
Practical reflection
Which selection or boundary would give the next stage clearer form without discarding useful range?
Reading method and boundary
This page explains the traditional correspondence between a branch and its Hidden Stems. It adds no weighting, strength, or activation judgment and infers no event from one branch.