Clash

Meaning

A clash sets two opposite branches against each other, six places apart on the circle of twelve: Zi and Wu, the Rat and the Horse; Chou and Wei, the Ox and the Goat; Yin and Shen, the Tiger and the Monkey; Mao and You, the Rabbit and the Rooster; Chen and Xu, the Dragon and the Dog; Si and Hai, the Snake and the Pig. Each pair faces across the compass and across the year, midwinter against midsummer, spring against autumn.

Four of the six set opposite phases against each other, Water against Fire, Wood against Metal; Zi and Wu, north against south, are counted the strongest. The other two set Earth against Earth, Chou against Wei and Chen against Xu: four storehouses that open each other, so that what each holds comes out. The tradition reads every clash as movement: change, a shake-up, journeys and new directions, friction that can clear the way.

Between people a clash is attraction and friction at once, two who see the world from opposite sides. Between a person and a year it is the year most likely to move things. In neither case is it a sentence: the tradition’s own advice is to use the movement rather than resist it.

In practice

• Between a person’s animals: Ulune suggests expecting some tension between the two sides of life the animals stand for, and using it: movement and change often settle it better than standing still.
• Two people: in the Relationship lens, two animals in a clash are opposites on the wheel, attraction and friction alike; respect for each other’s pace turns the friction into movement.
• The year ahead: a year whose animal clashes with the year animal is clashing with the Tai Sui, read as the year most likely to move things, at home, at work or in habits; a change chosen early often goes better than one that comes by itself.
• The Calendar gives each day the animal it clashes with, as the almanacs do, and marks the days that clash with the reader’s year animal, better kept for steady work than for big beginnings.
• In BaZi a clash between neighbouring pillars is felt most, and a clash on either branch of a combination keeps it from transforming.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology the clash is the opposition, two signs 180° apart, read too as tension and as awareness, the other side of oneself seen across the circle.
• In Indian astrology every planet looks at the seventh sign from its own, the opposite one, and the seventh house is the partner’s: the opposite as the one who completes, much as the Chinese clash can attract.
• In Feng Shui every home holds a clash: its facing and its sitting are opposite mountains, Wu facing for a Zi sitting, and the classics read that axis as the home’s spine, while the Year Breaker is the clash of the year’s ruler.

Origin and history

The axes are old. The Huainanzi, in 139 BC, calls the lines Zi–Wu and Mao–You the two cords that hold the sky, the meridian and the line of the equinoxes; their opposition was a structure of the cosmos before it was a relation between people. Xiao Ji’s Wuxing Dayi, around 600, gives the clashes a chapter, beside the harmonies and the punishments, and explains them by the phases that face each other.

The almanacs made the clash a daily matter: every day names the animal it clashes with, and the imperial Xieji Bianfang Shu of the 18th century sets out the day’s and the year’s clashes among the rules for choosing dates. The Zi Ping books read clashes between the pillars and between a chart and its times, the San Ming Tong Hui listing them pair by pair; the Di Tian Sui and Ren Tieqiao’s commentary weigh whether a clash shakes a chart awake or unsettles it, by the season and by what the clashing branches hold.

How Ulune calculates it

Two branches clash when their places, Zi counting 0, are six apart. The zodiac names the clash wherever two animals meet, in a person, between two people, with a year, a month or a day. The Calendar gives each date’s clash as the branch six places from the day’s, the day read from midnight as the almanacs print it. BaZi flags a clash between neighbouring pillars and counts a clash on either partner as breaking a combination. Feng Shui’s Year Breaker is the mountain of the branch six places from the year’s.

Correspondences