Daily pillar

Meaning

The daily pillar, 流日 liúrì, “the flowing day”, is the pillar of a day as it passes: one of the sixty, in the cycle of days that has run on without a break for some three thousand years. 23 October 2026 is a Geng-Wu day; 1 January 2000 was a Wu-Wu day. Everyone shares it; BaZi reads it against one birth chart at a time.

It is the finest grain of a chart’s time. Its stem is one of the Ten Gods for the Day Master, its branch’s main qi another, and Ulune’s reading of today says which, with what that god stands for and what the day meets among the four pillars. These are notes of colour for a day, not forecasts.

The tradition kept its days in almanacs long before it kept charts: the almanac, the Tong Shu, gives each day its pillar, its officer and the activities it suits, and readers have long looked up a day as they would look up the weather. Ulune keeps the day’s pillar and its gods for the reader’s chart, and leaves the almanac’s choices of days to the Calendar.

In practice

• Today, in the Cycles lens: when the year shown is the current one, Ulune reads today’s pillar for the chart, its stem’s god, its branch’s, and what it meets.
• Its meetings are found as for a year: stem combinations and clashes with the chart’s stems, harmonies, clashes, harms, punishments and destructions with its branches, and the trines and seasonal trios it completes.
• The day is the reader’s: the calendar day where the reader is, from midnight to midnight, rather than the birthplace’s.
• In the Calendar, every day draws its animal and opens a reading with its pillar, and the days whose animal clashes with the year animal are marked, as the almanacs mark them.

Across traditions

• In Korea the day’s pillar is the iljin, the word everyone uses for “the day’s luck”; in Japan the almanac still prints each day’s stem and branch, the eto of the day.
• In Chinese astrology the day’s animal is read against the birth animals, a clash or a harmony, as the almanac reads it.
• In Western astrology the nearest idea is the day’s transits, above all the Moon’s, which changes sign every two or three days and colours the mood of a day.

Origin and history

The sixty-day count is the oldest calendar in China: the Shang dynasty’s oracle bones, more than three thousand years ago, already date their divinations by it, and it has run on since, as far as the records can check, without a break. The almanacs of the Tang and later dynasties named each day’s pillar and what it suited, and the Zi Ping school read the flowing day as the last and smallest step of a chart’s time, after the luck pillar, the year and the month; the Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui use the same rules for a day as for a year.

How Ulune calculates it

The day’s place in the sixty-cycle is its Julian day number plus 49, modulo 60, the count that makes 1 January 2000 Wu-Wu and 1 October 1949 Jia-Zi. For today, Ulune takes the reader’s own calendar date; its stem’s god and its branch’s main qi’s god follow from the Day Master, and its meetings with the four pillars are found by the same rules as a year’s.

Correspondences