Indirect Resource structure

Meaning

The Indirect Resource structure is the frame of a chart whose month brings the Indirect Resource, the phase that produces the Day Master, of the same polarity. Ulune’s reading puts it in a sentence: it frames a life around insight, unusual knowledge, intuition, independent thought, and a taste for depth over the obvious. Where the Direct Resource is the care one receives, the Indirect Resource is the knowledge one finds for oneself, off the main road.

The tradition reads a searching, original mind: someone drawn to what lies beneath the surface, to rare subjects, to the arts, crafts and disciplines that ask for patience and solitude. Such a chart often learns best alone, trusts its intuition, and brings back from its own lines of research something others had not thought to look for.

Its difficulty is the hermit’s: a mind that withdraws into its own sources may forget to share them, and the classics watch its meeting with the Eating God, ease crowded out by study. Ulune reads the structure as a way of knowing, never as a solitude imposed.

In practice

• When Ulune names it: the month branch holds the Day Master’s Indirect Resource and it comes first, shown among the stems before the month’s other hidden stems, or as the month’s main qi, peers aside, when nothing else shows.
• Its months, by main qi: Jia in Hai, Yi in Zi, Bing in Yin, Ding in Mao, Ji in Wei, Geng in Chen or Xu, Xin in Chou or Wei, Ren in Shen, Gui in You. Wu has none: its Indirect Resource, Bing, leads only Si, Wu’s own stipend month, so a Wu Day Master finds this structure only in Yin, when Bing shows among the stems and Jia does not.
• What the classics look for: Seven Killings, which produce the Indirect Resource, a pairing the books praise as “Killings and Seal producing each other”, pressure turned into knowledge; and, for a strong self, an outlet. They watch Wealth, which controls the Resource, and the Eating God, which the Indirect Resource controls, the image they call “the owl snatching the food”.
• With strength: the Resource feeds the Day Master, so a weak Day Master in this structure is helped by its own frame; a strong one looks for an outlet for what it knows. Ulune shows the strength beside the structure.
• In time, a decade of the Indirect Resource is one of insight, unusual studies, solitude and intuition, as the luck pillars’ readings say: a time to follow your own lines of research.

Across traditions

• In Japan and Korea the structure is the hen’in-kaku of Shichū Suimei and the pyeonin-gyeok of saju.
• In Western astrology the closest theme is Neptune or Uranus strongly placed, or a full twelfth house, of retreat and the inner life: knowledge sought off the main road, read from planets and places rather than from the month.

Origin and history

The Yuanhai Ziping of the Song names the two Resources, the partial seal and the proper one, and both give a structure. The partial one kept a second name with an image of its own, the owl, 梟神 xiāoshén, for its meeting with the Eating God. Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, teaches that the direct and the partial Resource are both fine frames when they serve the self, and counts the owl among the forceful gods to be tempered when it turns against the Eating God; the San Ming Tong Hui and Xu Lewu’s commentary of 1936 give the same advice, to read the partial seal by what it feeds and what it crowds out.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune names the Indirect Resource structure when, after the Prosperity and Sword Edge tests, the first of the month branch’s non-peer hidden stems to show among the stems of the year, month and hour is the Day Master’s Indirect Resource, or, if none shows, when that stem is the first of them. The Indirect Resource is the stem of the phase that produces the Day Master’s, of the same polarity: Ren for Jia, Gui for Yi, Jia for Bing, Yi for Ding, Bing for Wu, Ding for Ji, Wu for Geng, Ji for Xin, Geng for Ren and Xin for Gui.

Correspondences