Self-punishment

Meaning

Four branches punish themselves: Chen, the Dragon; Wu, the Horse; You, the Rooster; Hai, the Pig. When one of them meets itself, twice in a chart, twice among a person’s animals, in two people at once, or in a year of its own, the tradition names a self-punishment: the same quality doubled until it turns back on itself.

Ulune reads each in the animal’s own terms. Chen twice is the Dragon’s ambition turned on itself; Wu twice the Horse’s haste, too much Fire at once; You twice the Rooster’s high standards turned inward; Hai twice the Pig’s generosity given until it runs dry. None of these is a fault: each is a gift pushed past its measure, and the tradition reads in it an invitation to balance, to be as patient with oneself as with others.

The other eight branches meeting themselves make no relation in the tradition: two Rats or two Tigers are simply the same animal, which recognise each other easily. The four that punish themselves are the ones left facing themselves when the trines are set beside the seasonal trios, the derivation that also gives the three punishments.

In practice

• Between a person’s animals: Ulune reads the same self-punishing animal in two places as a doubling of its strengths and its habits, and suggests being as patient with oneself as with others.
• Two people: in the Relationship lens, two people with the same self-punishing animal double its habit between them; laughing at it together helps.
• The year ahead: for the Dragon, the Horse, the Rooster and the Pig, the own year is also a self-punishment: the animal’s own habits come back to it, the good and the less good, to be looked at kindly; a month of one’s own animal asks the same kindness.
• In BaZi the same self-punishing branch on two or more pillars is named, with its own line, and read as too much of one quality, an invitation to balance it.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology two planets in one place, a conjunction, double what they share, and a crowd of planets in one sign, a stellium, is read as a gift that can become a habit: the same doubling, in other words.
• Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, set each virtue between two excesses, courage between rashness and fear, generosity between waste and meanness: the self-punishment’s lesson, too much of a good quality, in Greek dress.

Origin and history

The self-punishments come from the same derivation as the three punishments, which Xiao Ji’s Wuxing Dayi explains around 600: Water’s trine against the spring trio leaves Chen facing Chen; Fire’s trine against the summer trio, Wu facing Wu; Metal’s against the autumn trio, You facing You; Wood’s against the winter trio, Hai facing Hai. The four are the storehouse of Water, the peaks of Fire and Metal, and the birth of Wood, which is why some books see no common nature among them beyond that derivation.

The Zi Ping books, the Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui among them, list the four as the self-punishments, and the Di Tian Sui and Ren Tieqiao’s commentary read them with the rest of the chart. Some schools give them little weight; Ulune names them, in the gentle sense its texts give, wherever two of the same meet.

How Ulune calculates it

A self-punishment is the same branch twice, Chen, Wu, You or Hai: on two or more pillars in BaZi, in two of a person’s four animals, in two people’s animals, or between the reader’s animal and a year or a month. In time, Ulune names it beside the own year, the same animal coming back. The other eight branches meeting themselves are named as the same animal, never as a self-punishment.

Correspondences