Jue Ming · Depletion

Meaning

Jue Ming, 絕命 juémìng, is the last of the eight mansions and the last of the four challenging ones: for each Kua, in the tradition’s own words, the most draining direction. It suggests not sitting or sleeping facing it when one can choose, and keeping that side of the home for a bathroom, a storeroom or a cupboard, the rooms one uses briefly.

Ulune calls it Depletion, which is what the tradition reads in it: a direction that takes a little more than it gives, like a seat in a draught or a desk that faces the glare. It is a matter of what suits best, never of a place’s worth, and never a reason to worry: a room has its own constraints, and a direction one cannot avoid costs nothing. Its usefulness is real, since every home has rooms for which no direction matters, and the Eight Mansions send them here.

Jue Ming is the direction whose trigram differs from the person’s in its middle line alone, always across the groups: Kan ☵ and Kun ☷, Zhen ☳ and Dui ☱, Xun ☴ and Gen ☶, Qian ☰ and Li ☲. So Kua 1 and 2, 3 and 7, 4 and 8, 6 and 9 are each other’s Jue Ming.

In practice

• Less suited: where you can choose, the tradition suggests not sitting long facing your Jue Ming; a Kua 1 turns a chair away from the south-west, a Kua 2 from the north.
• What it can hold: a bathroom, a storeroom, a cupboard, a laundry, the rooms of passage the Eight Mansions are glad to see there.
• The home: when a home’s front or back is your Depletion, the Home lens says so in plain words; the tradition never asks anyone to move, and suggests using your own supportive directions within it.
• Two people: in the Relationship lens a direction can be one person’s Jue Ming and the other’s Sheng Qi; the lens keeps it for the second person’s own corner and finds the pair another direction for what they share.
• The years: the Cycles lens reads the year’s stars over this side too; a supportive star can make it easier for a while.

Across traditions

• In the Flying Stars Po Jun, the star the Ba Zhai Ming Jing gives Jue Ming, is the classical name of the 7 Red, the star of speech and charm, timely through Period 7; the same name, a different role.
• In Western astrology each chart has its harder places too, the squares and oppositions, read as tensions to work with rather than as verdicts; Jue Ming is read the same way, as a side to use well.
• In everyday building bathrooms and storerooms are often set where light and view matter least; the Eight Mansions give the same practical idea a direction of its own for each person.

Origin and history

The Ba Zhai Ming Jing, the Qing-dynasty manual of the Eight Mansions, sets Jue Ming eighth and last in its table and gives it the star Po Jun. In the classical method that finds the mansions by changing a trigram’s lines one at a time, Jue Ming comes on the seventh change, after which a last turn of the middle line returns the trigram to itself, Fu Wei.

Its classical name is the strongest of the eight, and translations have often made it frightening. Ulune does not translate it word for word: it names the direction for what the school uses it for, the side to keep for brief uses, and says so as the tradition’s reading, never as a fate.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads Jue Ming from the classical table of the Eight Mansions, the last of each Kua’s eight directions. The table follows the line rule exactly: Jue Ming is the direction whose trigram differs from the Kua’s own in the middle line only, and Ulune’s tests check that the table reads the same both ways and keeps each Kua’s four challenging directions in the other group.

Correspondences