Harm

Meaning

The six harms are six pairs of branches that rub quietly: Zi and Wei, the Rat and the Goat; Chou and Wu, the Ox and the Horse; Yin and Si, the Tiger and the Snake; Mao and Chen, the Rabbit and the Dragon; Shen and Hai, the Monkey and the Pig; You and Xu, the Rooster and the Dog. Some schools call them the six piercings.

Each harm spoils a harmony. The Rat’s partner is the Ox, and the Goat clashes with the Ox: so the Goat and the Rat harm each other, the one upsetting what the other holds dear. The same holds round the circle: the Horse clashes with the Rat, the Ox’s partner; the Snake with the Pig, the Tiger’s; the Dragon with the Dog, the Rabbit’s. On the wheel the harms are mirror images across the other axis, the line between the Rabbit and the Dragon and between the Rooster and the Dog.

The tradition reads a harm as a quieter friction than a clash: misunderstandings rather than open conflict, care that misreads what the other needs, two good intentions that miss each other. What dissolves it is naming it. Yin and Si, the Tiger and the Snake, are a punishment too, the only harm that is also one.

In practice

• Between a person’s animals: Ulune reads two animals in a harm as two sides of a life between which small misunderstandings can arise, and suggests naming them early, which keeps them small.
• Two people: in the Relationship lens, small misunderstandings come easily between two animals in a harm; saying things plainly keeps them small.
• The year ahead: a year whose animal harms the year animal is the tradition’s harm to the Tai Sui (害太歲), read as small frictions worth meeting with plain words and patience; in a month, plain words go further than usual.
• In BaZi a harm between two pillars is named with its pair’s own line, the Rat and the Goat’s care that misreads, the Ox and the Horse’s patience and haste at odds, and read as a mild friction, milder than a clash or a punishment.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology the harms fall on the aspects of adjustment: four of them join signs 30° or 150° apart, the semi-sextile and the quincunx, and two signs a square apart. Hellenistic astrologers called signs 30° or 150° apart averse, unable to see each other, which is close to the misunderstanding the Chinese tradition reads in a harm.
• Modern Western synastry reads such contacts between two charts as the small adjustments a shared life asks for, not as obstacles: the same advice, to say plainly what each needs.

Origin and history

The harms are explained, in the old books, by the harmonies and the clashes they come from. Xiao Ji’s Wuxing Dayi, around 600, gives them a chapter of their own beside the harmonies, the punishments and the clashes, and the Zi Ping books, the Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui, list the six pairs among the relations to read between the pillars.

Folk matchmaking took them up: old rhymes gave each harm a pair of images, such as the golden rooster and the jade dog for You and Xu, and families once weighed them before a marriage. The Di Tian Sui and Ren Tieqiao’s commentary give them less weight than clashes and combinations, and many modern masters read them only beside the rest of a chart. The zodiac’s portraits of each pair, such as Theodora Lau’s in her Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes (1979), made them a matter of patience between two people.

How Ulune calculates it

Two branches harm each other when their places, Zi counting 0, add up to seven or nineteen: Zi and Wei, Chou and Wu, Yin and Si, Mao and Chen, Shen and Hai, You and Xu. The zodiac names the harm wherever two animals meet, in a person, between two people, with a year, a month or a day. BaZi names it between two pillars, flags it when the pillars stand side by side, and gives each pair its own line.

Correspondences