Relations

Meaning

The relations are the set ways in which two Earthly Branches, or two Heavenly Stems, meet. Each branch stands at a fixed place on the circle of twelve, so how it meets another is a matter of their places: across the circle, a third of the way round, side by side, mirrored across an axis. The tradition named each pattern and gave it a sense, and every Chinese language reads them, the zodiac between animals, BaZi between pillars, the almanac between a day and a person.

They fall into two kinds. Some bring together: the six harmonies, pairs that hold each other like a couple; the four trines, three branches that make one phase, and their half trines; the four seasonal trios, the three branches of one season. Others rub: the six clashes between opposite branches, the six harms, the three punishments and the four branches that punish themselves, the six destructions. The stems have their own two: the five stem combinations and the four stem clashes.

Two branches can hold more than one relation at once. Si and Shen, the Snake and the Monkey, are a harmony, a punishment and a destruction together; Yin and Hai a harmony and a destruction. The tradition reads such pairs as bonds with an edge, close and demanding at the same time. None of the tensions is a verdict: they are read as movement, friction that teaches, places that ask for care.

In practice

• The zodiac lists every relation between a person’s four animals, between two people’s, and between the reader’s animals and the year, the month or the day; its wheel draws them as lines.
• BaZi reads them between the four pillars, under “Between your pillars”, and asks for each combination whether it transforms into a phase, with conditions the reader can check one by one; each new luck pillar, year, month and day is read by what it meets in the chart.
• The Calendar marks the days whose animal clashes with the reader’s year animal, as the almanacs do.
• Feng Shui places the year’s afflictions by them: the Year Breaker opposite the year’s branch, a clash, and the Three Killings opposite the direction of the year’s trine.

Across traditions

• Western astrology measures the same circle in angles. The Chinese trine is its trine, three signs 120° apart, and the clash its opposition, 180°; the destructions all fall a square apart, 90°, and the punishments a square or an opposition.
• The harmonies have a twin of another kind: mapped onto the Western signs, as the Chinese astrology of the Seven Governors mapped them, Zi on Aquarius and Wu on Leo, every harmony joins two signs with the same ruling planet.
• Chinese medicine knows the stem combinations: the Suwen’s doctrine of the five movements gives each pair of stems the same phase, Jia and Ji Earth, Yi and Geng Metal, and so on.

Origin and history

The patterns are old. The Huainanzi, in 139 BC, already knows that each phase is born, peaks and dies in three branches four apart, the root of the trines, and it calls the lines Zi–Wu and Mao–You the two cords that hold the sky. Xiao Ji’s Wuxing Dayi, around 600, gathers the harmonies, punishments, clashes and harms in chapters of their own, with the reasons the scholars of his time gave for them.

The Zi Ping school made them a tool for reading a chart. The Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui list them with their names, the three punishments as the ungrateful, the one of power and the uncivil, and debate when a combination truly transforms; the Di Tian Sui and Ren Tieqiao’s commentary weigh them against the season and the rest of the chart. The schools still differ on the details, the phase of Wu and Wei, the weight of the destructions, the conditions of a transformation, and Ulune says which it follows.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune computes every relation from the branches’ and stems’ places, numbered from Zi and from Jia, never from a list: harmonies are the pairs whose places add up to one, modulo twelve; trines lie four places apart; clashes six; harms add up to seven; destructions join a yang branch with the one three places before it; the punishments are three fixed groups, and Chen, Wu, You and Hai punish themselves. Stems combine five places apart and clash six apart, the Earth stems never. The rules are checked against the classical tables, and in BaZi the conditions of each transformation are stated, not hidden.

Correspondences