Luck pillar

Meaning

A luck pillar, 大運 dàyùn, “the great cycle”, is a pillar of ten years. The tradition draws a series of them from the month pillar, one step of the sixty-cycle at a time, forward or backward, and reads each as a chapter of a life: for its decade, its stem and its branch stand beside the four pillars of birth and meet them, as a season stands over a landscape.

Each luck pillar is read by what it brings the Day Master: its stem is one of the Ten Gods, and its branch’s main qi another. Ulune’s readings give the theme of each: a decade of the Direct Resource is one of support and learning, a time to receive and to grow; a decade of Seven Killings one of challenge and ambition, a time that rewards courage and a clear aim. They also say what the pillar meets in the chart, the combinations and clashes, the trines and seasonal trios it completes.

The word is “luck” in English by habit, and “fortune” in the old translations; the tradition means the turn of the seasons of a life rather than chance. No decade is good or bad in itself: each brings a different weather, and the readings say what it favours.

In practice

• The direction: forward when the year stem’s polarity and the tradition’s count agree, a yang year with a yang count or a yin year with a yin count; backward otherwise.
• The count: classically a matter of sex, yang for a man and yin for a woman; Ulune asks for a yin or yang count only as an option of the birth, never sends it, and shows both directions when it is not given.
• The start: the days from the birth to the next opening term, going forward, or back to the last one, going backward, three days making a year, so one day is four months; the first luck pillar starts at that age.
• Nine pillars: Ulune lists nine, to past ninety, each with its ages, its gods and what it meets; the Cycles lens follows them with a slider through life.
• A year inside a decade: each annual pillar is read with the luck pillar it falls in, and what the two meet.
• Two people: the Relationship lens compares the luck pillar each person is in now.

Across traditions

• In Japan and Korea the luck pillars are taiun and daeun, read the same way, in decades from the month pillar.
• In Western astrology the nearest ideas are the time-lord techniques, the firdaria and the annual profections, which hand the chart to one planet after another for a period, and the secondary progressions, which also turn days after birth into years of life.

Origin and history

The ten-year cycles are as old as the Zi Ping school: the Song dynasty Yuanhai Ziping counts them from the month, with the direction set by the year’s polarity and the sex, and the start by the days to the term, three days to a year. The San Ming Tong Hui sets out the same rules, and later books argue over the details: whether to count to the term or to its exact hour, and whether the stem rules the first five years and the branch the last five, as some teach. The Di Tian Sui, with Ren Tieqiao’s commentary, insists that a luck pillar is read through the chart it meets; the Ziping Zhenquan, through the structure it helps or troubles.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune finds the opening term after the birth, going forward, or the one at or before it, going backward, as instants, and counts the days between; divided by three they give the starting age, shown in years, months and days. The luck pillars are the month pillar’s neighbours in the sixty-cycle, one step per pillar, nine of them. Each is read for its whole decade, its stem and its branch’s main qi as gods for the Day Master, and its meetings with the four pillars found by the same rules as a year’s.

Correspondences