Earthly Branches

Meaning

The twelve Earthly Branches, dìzhī, are Zi, Chou, Yin, Mao, Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Xu and Hai: 子丑寅卯辰巳午未申酉戌亥. Where the ten Heavenly Stems count in tens, the branches count in twelves: the months of the year, the double hours of the day, the directions of the compass and, through the twelve animals, the years. Every pillar of the calendar is a stem standing over a branch, and in each pillar the branch is the ground, the season and the place where the stem stands.

Each branch is a month of the farmer’s year and a moment of its growth. The Han dictionaries read them in turn: in Zi, at midwinter, life begins to stir underground; in Chou it is still bound; in Yin it is drawn out; in Mao it breaks through the soil as through an open gate; in Chen the spring thunder shakes it; in Si yang is fully out; in Wu, at midsummer, yin rises against it; in Wei things gain their flavour; in Shen they grow firm; in You they ripen and the millet can be made into wine; in Xu yang withdraws into the earth; in Hai, the roots wait for the year to begin again.

The branches carry the five phases round the year: Yin and Mao are the Wood of spring, Si and Wu the Fire of summer, Shen and You the Metal of autumn, Hai and Zi the Water of winter, and four Earth branches, Chen, Wei, Xu and Chou, close each season and hold it in store. They also fall into three groups of four that BaZi reads constantly: the four at the cardinal points, Zi, Mao, Wu and You, the hearts of the seasons, each pure in its phase; the four that begin the seasons, Yin, Si, Shen and Hai, where each phase is born; and the four storehouses, Chen, Wei, Xu and Chou, each holding three stems.

In practice

• In BaZi, the branch is the lower half of each pillar and the stems it holds hidden count in the chart as much as the stems that show (hidden stems). The day’s branch is the partner palace, the seat of close bonds; the month’s branch gives the season, and with it the strength of every phase.
• Between branches the tradition reads relations: six harmonies, four trines of three, four seasonal trios, six clashes across the circle, six harms, the punishments and six destructions. BaZi reads them between the pillars, Chinese astrology between a person’s animals and between two people’s.
• In Chinese astrology, each branch is one of the twelve animals: Zi the Rat, Chou the Ox, Yin the Tiger, Mao the Rabbit, Chen the Dragon, Si the Snake, Wu the Horse, Wei the Goat, Shen the Monkey, You the Rooster, Xu the Dog and Hai the Pig.
• In time: the year’s branch turns at Lichun, 2026 being a Wu year, the Horse’s; each solar month opens at its term, the Tiger month at Lichun about 4 February; each double hour is a branch, Zi from 23:00 to 01:00 and so on round the day.
• In Feng Shui, the twelve branches are twelve of the 24 mountains of the luopan, with Zi at the north, Mao at the east, Wu at the south and You at the west; the year’s ruler, Tai Sui, sits in the year’s branch, and the Calendar marks each day’s animal and the one it clashes with.

Across traditions

• Japan, Korea and Vietnam use the same twelve: in Japan they are the jūnishi, read ne, ushi, tora, u…; Korea counts ja, chuk, in, myo…; Vietnam reads Tý, Sửu, Dần, Mão…, and its zodiac has the Cat for Mao, the water buffalo for Chou and the goat for Wei.
• The meridian is still called the Zi-Wu line, 子午線 zǐwǔxiàn, in Chinese and in Japanese, from the branches of the north and the south, and the hours before and after noon are 午前 and 午後, before and after Wu.
• A twelvefold day was also Babylon’s, whose astronomers divided the day into twelve double hours, and a twelvefold circle the zodiac’s. When Chinese astrologers took up the Western signs, they set them on the branches, the palace of Zi holding Aquarius and that of Wu Leo, running the other way round the sky.

Origin and history

The twelve branch characters are as old as the stems: the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty, around 1250–1046 BC, pair them with the stems to name each day of the sixty-day count. Their first meanings are lost, and they had nothing yet to do with animals. In the Warring States period they came to name the twelve months, the twelve directions of the horizon and, in astronomy, the twelve stations of Jupiter, whose round of the sky in about twelve years gave a count of years; the Erya, a glossary of the 3rd century BC, records old names for the years by the branch in which Jupiter’s counterpart, the Tai Sui, stood.

The Huainanzi (139 BC) sets out the branches as months and directions, and Sima Qian and Ban Gu explained their names as stages of growing things, which Xu Shen’s dictionary (c. 100) repeated from the shapes of the characters. The double hours, twelve to a day, were named by them from the Han dynasty on. The animals came last: the day books of the Qin dynasty found at Shuihudi (about 217 BC) give the branches animals, some of them unlike today’s, and Wang Chong’s Lunheng, in the 1st century, gives all twelve as they are known now.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune numbers the branches from Zi and reads each from its pillar’s place in the sixty-cycle, the place counted in twelves. The year’s branch changes at the exact moment of Lichun; the month’s at each of the twelve solar terms that open a month, the Tiger’s at Lichun and the Ox’s at Xiaohan in January; the day’s follows the count of days; the hour’s is the double hour of the birth on true solar time by default, Zi running from 23:00 to 01:00, Chou from 01:00 to 03:00 and so on. Settings offer local mean time or the clock on the wall.

The relations are computed by the classical rules on the branches’ places: two branches whose places add up to 1 (counting round twelve) are a harmony, two six apart a clash, two four apart of one trine, two whose places add up to 7 a harm; the punishments are three set groups and four branches that punish themselves; a destruction joins a yang branch and the one three places before it. The hidden stems are the common table, weighted 100, 70 and 30, or 60, 30 and 10. On the zodiac’s wheel the Rat stands at the north, at the top, and the others follow clockwise, the Rabbit at the east and the Horse at the south.

Correspondences