BaZi

BaZi, 八字 bāzì, means “eight characters”. A birth is written as four pillars, of the year, the month, the day and the hour, and each pillar is a Heavenly Stem standing over an Earthly Branch: eight characters in all, which is why the method is also called the Four Pillars. Ulune works them out from the moment and the place of a birth, then reads them the way the Zi Ping school has read them for a thousand years.

At the centre stands the Day Master, the stem of the day pillar, which stands for the person. Every other character is read by how it meets it: by its phase among the five phases, the same as the Day Master’s, producing it, produced by it, controlling it or controlled by it, and by its polarity, yin or yang, the same or the other. Those ten relations are the Ten Gods, from the Companion to the Direct Resource, each with its theme: peers, expression, wealth, the power that shapes, the resources that support.

From there the reading widens. The balance of the five phases, counted with the stems hidden in the branches, shows what a chart holds much of and what it holds little of; the strength of the Day Master, its structure and the phases that favour it follow from that balance. The twelve life stages tell how strong each stem stands in each branch, the symbolic stars mark a few traditional signs, and the branches meet in harmonies, clashes and the rest. In time, the luck pillars change every ten years, and each year, month and day brings a pillar of its own to meet the chart. Two charts can also be read side by side.

Reading a life from the pillars goes back at least to Li Xuzhong (761–813), who read the year, month and day; at the start of the Song dynasty, Xu Ziping added the hour and put the stem of the day at the centre, and the method has carried his name ever since. Its classics, the Yuanhai Ziping, the San Ming Tong Hui, the Di Tian Sui and the Ziping Zhenquan, are the ones Ulune follows, and its method notes say at each step which convention it chose: true solar time by default, a day that turns at 23:00, months that begin with the solar terms. Ulune offers what the tradition sees as tendencies and suggestions, never as a fate.

The foundations BaZi reads, the five phases and yin and yang first, are in Chinese cosmology; Chinese astrology reads the same four pillars through their animals. BaZi’s own pages are all written: the Ten Gods, the life stages, the symbolic stars, the structures, and the ideas of the method, from the four pillars and their empty branches to the partner palace that two charts compare.