Hidden stems

Meaning

Each of the twelve Earthly Branches holds one, two or three of the ten Heavenly Stems inside it, its hidden stems. A stem is a single phase in one polarity; a branch is a small mixture. Yin, the Tiger, is mostly Jia, yang Wood, with some Bing Fire and a little Wu Earth; Zi, the Rat, holds Gui, yin Water, and nothing else. The first and largest is the branch’s main qi, always of the branch’s own phase; the others, where there are any, are its middle and residual qi.

The mixture follows the year. The cardinal branches, Zi, Mao and You, in the heart of their seasons, hold a single stem, and Wu, midsummer, holds Ding Fire with Ji Earth. The four branches that open the seasons, Yin, Si, Shen and Hai, hold the phase being born there: Fire in Yin, Metal in Si, Water in Shen, Wood in Hai. The four storehouses that close them, Chen, Wei, Xu and Chou, hold Earth, what remains of the season just ending, and the phase they store, Water in Chen, Wood in Wei, Fire in Xu, Metal in Chou.

The classics call them the human element: in each pillar the visible stem is Heaven’s, the branch Earth’s, and the stems hidden in the branch are where the two meet. BaZi reads much of a chart there, for a branch acts through what it holds.

In practice

• On the board: Ulune’s BaZi shows each branch’s hidden stems under it, each with its Ten God, its relation to the Day Master, so the reader sees what each pillar brings beyond its two visible characters.
• The balance: the five phases are counted with them, each hidden stem by its weight, and the month branch’s twice, for the season.
• Roots: a visible stem has roots when a branch holds a stem of its phase; the Day Master’s roots are one of the three tests of its strength, with the season and the support of the other stems.
• The structure: after the Ziping Zhenquan, the structure comes from the month branch’s hidden stems: the first that also shows among the visible stems, “revealed”, or else the main qi.
• The zodiac shows them too, in its table of the four animals, for those who want to see what each animal holds.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology a sign is not one thing either: it holds three decans of ten degrees, each with a planet of its own, which the Hellenistic and medieval astrologers read as faces inside the sign.
• In Indian astrology each sign is divided into nine navamshas, each given a sign of its own, and the chart they make is read as the fruit hidden in the birth chart.
• On the Feng Shui compass the same idea shows in space: the mountain of Zi, in the north, stands between Ren and Gui, the two Water stems, and the middle branch of each season is flanked by the stems of its phase.

Origin and history

The idea grew from the life of the phases through the year. The Huainanzi, in 139 BC, says that each phase is born in one branch, at its height in a second and dies in a third, Wood born in Hai, at its height in Mao, ending in Wei; the hidden stems of the birth branches and the storehouses keep that course.

The tables themselves come from the books of the Zi Ping school. The Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui list the stems each branch holds and share out among them the days of its month, the main qi ruling longest; the Di Tian Sui, with Ren Tieqiao’s commentary, reads a stem’s roots in the branches with care, and Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan builds a chart’s structure on the month branch’s hidden stems. The books do not all agree: some add Wu Earth to Hai, others weigh the stems differently. Ulune follows the common table below and names its method.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune uses one table for every chart, with the weights a common method gives: a single stem counts 100, two stems 70 and 30, three stems 60, 30 and 10. In the phase balance each visible stem counts one point and each hidden stem its weight, a hundred to a point, the month branch’s twice, so that four pillars make nine points. A stem is rooted when any branch holds a stem of its phase, whatever its weight. The structure looks first for the Day Master’s own branch in the month, then for the month’s hidden stems, the main qi first, setting aside those of the Day Master’s own phase.

Correspondences