Follow Wealth

Meaning

Following Wealth, 從財格 cóngcái gé, is the name some schools give a chart whose Day Master holds almost nothing of its own, with no root and no helper, and whose strongest force is Wealth, the phase it controls: Direct and Indirect Wealth. Wealth in BaZi is what the self can shape and manage, its work, its means and the material of its projects; a self too slight to hold it all goes with it instead. Ulune’s reading puts it so: following Wealth, the Day Master goes with what it controls, and some schools read a life carried by its work, its resources and its practical sense.

The tradition reads a person who finds their footing in the concrete: in a trade, a craft, a business or a household well run, in what can be built, counted and handed on. The classics like it best with output to feed the Wealth and an Officer for the Wealth to produce, a flow that runs through the chart rather than back to the self.

It is a disputed reading, and Ulune says so. The flag stands beside the month’s structure, which it does not replace, and the favourable phases are shown turned round, with the reminder that schools disagree: a possibility to weigh, never riches promised.

In practice

• When Ulune flags it: when the Day Master’s own phase and the one producing it hold 20% of the chart’s points or less, no branch holds a stem of the Day Master’s phase, no stem of the year, month or hour is of its phase or the one producing it, and wealth is the strongest of output, wealth and power.
• Beside the structure: Ulune still names the month’s structure; the flag is added in the analysis and in the structure’s reading, with the share of support that raised it.
• The favourable phases turn round: when the chart is read as following, the helpful phases are output, wealth and power, phases the chart is already full of, and the Day Master’s own phase and its resource are the least helpful.
• With strength: such a Day Master is usually weak by Ulune’s three tests; the flag looks at the whole count rather than at the tests.
• What the classics look for: output, which produces Wealth, and the Officer, which Wealth produces; they watch the peers, which would compete for the Wealth, and the Resource, which would turn the chart back to the self.

Across traditions

• In Japan and Korea the structure is the jūzai-kaku of Shichū Suimei and the jongjae-gyeok of saju.
• In Western astrology the closest picture is a chart whose planets gather in the earth signs or in the houses of work and resources, the second, sixth and tenth, when the Sun is weakly placed: the self found in what it builds.

Origin and history

The Ming books, the San Ming Tong Hui among them, already describe a self so slight that it gives itself to the Wealth around it, and read such charts by what the Wealth can do rather than by what the self lacks. The Di Tian Sui, with Ren Tieqiao’s commentary under the Qing, sets the rule for every following chart: when the self cannot stand, go with the strongest force, and separate true following, with nothing to support the self, from false following, with a little. Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan, which reads every chart from its month, keeps them to the margins. Xu Lewu, who commented both the Di Tian Sui and the Ziping Zhenquan in the first half of the 20th century, set the two approaches side by side, and modern teachers still disagree on how often a chart truly follows.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune counts the five phases, each visible stem one point and each hidden stem by its weight, the month’s twice. When the Day Master’s own phase and the phase producing it hold 20% of the total or less, when no branch, the day’s included, holds a stem of the Day Master’s phase, and when no stem of the year, month or hour is of its phase or the one producing it, the chart is read as following; it compares the points of output, wealth and power, and the strongest names the structure, output first when two are level. When wealth leads, Ulune flags Following Wealth.

Correspondences