Chinese cosmology

Chinese cosmology is the ground Ulune’s three Chinese languages stand on. Chinese astrology reads the animals of a birth, BaZi its four pillars, Feng Shui a home and its directions; but they read them with the same building blocks, and those blocks are gathered here, each told once for all three.

At the root are the five phases, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, and yin and yang: five movements of change and the two sides of every one of them. On them rest the ten Heavenly Stems, which count the days in tens, and the twelve Earthly Branches, which count the months and the hours in twelves and give the twelve animals their places. Paired in turn, stem over branch, they make the sixty pillars of the sixty-cycle that names every year, month, day and double hour of the Chinese calendar, and each pair of pillars has its Na Yin, a sound and an image of its own.

Around them stand the twenty-four solar terms, which divide the Sun’s year and open the solar months, from the Start of Spring to Major Cold; the relations between branches and between stems, harmonies, clashes and the rest, which tell how two pillars meet; the eight trigrams, three lines whole or broken, which give Feng Shui its directions; and a few ideas all three languages use, the stems hidden in each branch, Tai Sui, the ruler of the year, the solar month and the Lo Shu, the magic square of nine.

Every entry gives its name in Chinese, in Traditional and Simplified characters, and in pinyin with its tones, as Ulune’s pages write them; in Settings you choose which characters the pages show, and whether they show the characters and the pinyin at all. The families appear here as they are written, each one whole, the five phases first; where a page names a term still to come, the word stays plain until its page exists.