Seasonal trio

Meaning

A seasonal trio gathers the three branches of one season, which are also one direction and one phase. Yin, Mao and Chen are spring, the east and Wood, the Tiger, the Rabbit and the Dragon; Si, Wu and Wei are summer, the south and Fire; Shen, You and Xu autumn, the west and Metal; Hai, Zi and Chou winter, the north and Water. On the circle of twelve they are three neighbours, a quarter of the round.

The tradition counts it the strongest of the branches’ combinations, a whole season held in a chart. A trine gathers a phase’s birth, peak and storehouse from three corners of the year; a trio gathers the three months in which the phase rules, one after the other, and so its force is the season’s own. Each trio ends with an Earth branch, the storehouse that closes the season, but the trio is read as the season’s phase, not as Earth.

Its other name says the same thing: the directional combination, for each trio is one side of the compass. The classics take care to keep it apart from the trine, which they call a frame rather than a direction, and to read each by its own rules.

In practice

• In BaZi a whole trio, its three branches on three pillars, transforms into its phase when the month supports that phase and no other branch clashes any of the three; Ulune states both conditions and reads the result.
• In time: when a luck pillar, a year, a month or a day brings the third branch of a trio whose other two stand in the chart, Ulune names the trio it completes, and its phase, for that time.
• The season itself: the same three branches decide whether the month supports a phase, the condition every transformation asks for, and the month a chart is born in brings its trio’s climate, winter asking for Fire, summer for Water.
• The zodiac does not name the trios: its relations are between pairs of animals, and the season of a birth is read through the month animal.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology each season has its three signs too, Aries, Taurus and Gemini for spring: cardinal, fixed and mutable, the season opened, held and passed on. But they belong to three different elements, where the Chinese trio is a single phase.
• Chinese astronomy gave each quarter of the sky its guardian, the Azure Dragon of the east, the Vermilion Bird of the south, the White Tiger of the west and the Black Tortoise of the north, each a season, a direction and seven lunar mansions: the same quarters, written across the stars.
• In India the year is shared into six seasons of two months each, the ritus, from spring to the late winter: a finer cut of the same year, where the Chinese count four seasons of three months.

Origin and history

Seasons and directions have belonged together since the oldest calendars. The “Twelve Months” of the Lüshi Chunqiu, around 239 BC, has the ruler move through the halls of the Hall of Light with the year, facing east in the three months of spring and south in summer, wearing the season’s colour; the Huainanzi, in 139 BC, sets the branches of each season on its side of the compass.

The Zi Ping books made the trio a combination of a chart. The Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui name the four trios and their phases, and the Di Tian Sui warns, in a line its commentators have repeated since, that “a direction is a direction, a frame is a frame”: a trio must be whole, and must not be read as a trine. Ren Tieqiao’s commentary weighs each trio against the season of the month and the rest of the chart.

How Ulune calculates it

A seasonal trio is named when its three branches stand on three different pillars of a chart, in any order: Yin, Mao and Chen; Si, Wu and Wei; Shen, You and Xu; Hai, Zi and Chou. Its conditions are stated one by one: the three are all there, the month branch supports the phase, and no branch outside the trio clashes any of them. When every condition is met, the trio is read as its phase. In time, the trio a new pillar completes with two of the chart’s branches is named as well.

Correspondences