Empty branches

Meaning

The sixty pillars fall into six ten-day weeks, 旬 xún, each opened by a Jia stem: the Jia-Zi week, the Jia-Xu week, and so on. A week pairs its ten stems with ten of the twelve branches, and two branches are left over, with no stem of their own in that week. Those two are its empty branches, 空亡 kōngwáng, “empty and gone”, also called 旬空 xúnkōng, the week’s void. A chart’s empty branches are those of the week its day pillar is in.

Ulune’s reading puts them gently: a pillar on an empty branch is read as quieter, its promise slower to show, more inward than outward. Emptiness here is a lack of hold rather than a loss: what such a pillar stands for may take longer to settle, or show itself in another way than expected, and the classics add that an empty branch can be “filled” when time brings it, by a clash or by a year of the same branch.

It is a nuance, not a verdict. Most charts have one pillar or none on an empty branch, and the tradition reads emptiness as it reads every sign: beside the whole chart, never instead of it.

In practice

• On the board, a pillar whose branch is one of the day’s empty branches carries a dashed mark; the day pillar itself never does, since its own week holds it.
• Beside the board, the two empty branches are listed, and their reading says which week the day pillar is in, which branches it leaves out and which pillars stand on them.
• In time, the full table marks a luck pillar or a year whose branch is empty for the chart.
• The six weeks: the Jia-Zi week leaves out Xu and Hai; Jia-Xu, Shen and You; Jia-Shen, Wu and Wei; Jia-Wu, Chen and Si; Jia-Chen, Yin and Mao; Jia-Yin, Zi and Chou.

Across traditions

• In Japan and Korea they are kūbō and gongmang; in Japan the same pairs are also widely known as tenchūsatsu, named by their two branches, the Zi-Chou tenchūsatsu, the Xu-Hai and so on, a popular reading of their own.
• In Feng Shui the word comes back on the compass: a facing that falls on the line between two of the 24 mountains is a void line, 空亡, read as unsettled.
• In Western astrology the nearest picture is the void-of-course Moon, a stretch when the Moon makes no further aspect before changing sign, read as a time when things take hold less readily.

Origin and history

The empty branches belong to the calendar before they belong to BaZi: the six weeks of the sixty-cycle were the Shang dynasty’s way of counting days, and the two leftover branches of each were noticed early. The Song dynasty Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui of the Ming read them among the chart’s signs, counted from the day or, in some passages, from the year, and the books list what an empty branch does to each god and each star. The Di Tian Sui, with Ren Tieqiao’s commentary, gives them little weight beside the balance of the whole, and modern teachers mostly read them as a quieter note.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes the day pillar’s place in the sixty-cycle and finds the Jia that opened its week, ten places or fewer before it. That week runs from the branch of its Jia through the next nine; the two branches after them are empty. Ulune counts from the day only, as most modern Zi Ping books do, and marks every other pillar, natal or in time, whose branch is one of the two.

Correspondences