Destruction

Meaning

The six destructions join each yang branch with the branch three places before it: Zi and You, the Rat and the Rooster; Yin and Hai, the Tiger and the Pig; Chen and Chou, the Dragon and the Ox; Wu and Mao, the Horse and the Rabbit; Shen and Si, the Monkey and the Snake; Xu and Wei, the Dog and the Goat. Each pair stands a quarter of the circle apart.

The word, pò, means to break or to split open, but the tradition counts the destruction the mildest of the tensions. It loosens what the branches hold rather than breaking it: plans that need mending, a bond that wears and asks for care, what one builds that the other would like to change. Read so, it is less a breakage than an invitation to look twice before committing.

Two of the six are also harmonies: Yin and Hai, a harmony and a destruction at once, closeness that asks for care; Si and Shen, a harmony, a punishment and a destruction together. Wei and Xu are also of one punishment, the punishment of power. The tradition reads such pairs as bonds with an edge, close and demanding at the same time.

In practice

• Between a person’s animals: Ulune reads two animals in a destruction as two sides of a life of which one may want to change what the other builds, and suggests a second look before committing, which keeps both content.
• Two people: in the Relationship lens, what one builds, the other may want to change; deciding together keeps both content.
• The year ahead: a year whose animal destroys the year animal is the tradition’s 破太歲, read as a year when plans may need reshaping along the way, in which flexibility keeps what matters; in a month, keep what matters and let the rest adjust.
• In BaZi a destruction between two pillars is named with its pair’s line, the Rat and the Rooster’s bond loosened by too many words, the Horse and the Rabbit’s Wood feeding Fire too fast, and read as the mildest of the tensions.
• Not the Year Breaker: Feng Shui’s Year Breaker, suì pò, shares the character but is the clash of the year’s ruler, the branch opposite it, not a destruction.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology every destruction is a square, two signs 90° apart, the aspect of friction and effort: read there too as a tension that asks for work rather than as a break.
• In Indian astrology the same quarter of the circle counts the other way: planets in the kendras, a quarter or a half of the round from one another, are held to strengthen each other. The same angle carries effort in one tradition, support in another.

Origin and history

The destructions are the least discussed of the relations. Xiao Ji’s Wuxing Dayi, around 600, treats them beside the clashes, and the Zi Ping books, the Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui, list the six pairs; but the Di Tian Sui and Ren Tieqiao’s commentary give them far less weight than combinations, clashes and punishments, and many modern masters leave them aside, reading only those that come with another relation, as Yin and Hai or Si and Shen do.

The zodiac kept them in its lists of compatibilities. Popular books of the 20th century, such as Theodora Lau’s Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes (1979), read the six pairs as couples who must agree on what they build, and Ulune, which names them everywhere, keeps their gentle sense: a bond that asks for care.

How Ulune calculates it

Two branches make a destruction when one is yang, with an even place, Zi counting 0, and the other stands three places before it: Zi and You, Yin and Hai, Chen and Chou, Wu and Mao, Shen and Si, Xu and Wei. The zodiac names it wherever two animals meet, with a person, between two people, with a year, a month or a day. BaZi names it between two pillars, flags it when they stand side by side, and gives each pair its line.

Correspondences