Structures

Meaning

A chart’s structure, 格局 géjú, is its frame: the theme that the month of birth gives the whole chart. BaZi reads the month as the season one was born into and the strongest of the four pillars, and the god its branch brings to the Day Master names the structure: a Direct Officer structure, an Eating God structure, a Direct Resource structure. Where the other parts of a reading describe qualities one by one, the structure says what kind of chart it is.

There are ten standard structures. Eight are named after the Ten Gods other than the peers: the Direct Officer and Seven Killings, Direct and Indirect Wealth, the Direct and Indirect Resource, the Eating God and the Hurting Officer. Two come from the Day Master’s own ground: the Prosperity structure, when the month is its stipend, and the Sword Edge structure, when the month is a yang Day Master’s peak. Beside them stand four “follow” structures, for the rare charts so full or so empty of the Day Master’s own phase that some schools read them by different rules; Ulune flags them and says they are disputed.

A structure is a frame, not a verdict. Ulune’s readings put it so: the Direct Officer structure frames a life around order and trust, the Hurting Officer structure around brilliance and freedom, and none is luckier or better than another. The classics then ask whether a structure is well formed, helped by the gods that serve it and spared from those that would disturb it; Ulune names the structure, says how it was found, and leaves that weighing to the reading of the whole chart.

In practice

• In the analysis, beside the balance of the phases and the Day Master’s strength, Ulune names the chart’s structure; its reading says what frame it gives and exactly how it was found, from which hidden stem of the month and, when it shows, on which pillar.
• How it is found: if the month branch is the Day Master’s Prosperity branch, the Prosperity structure; if it is a yang Day Master’s Sword Edge, the Sword Edge structure; otherwise the month branch’s hidden stems, peers aside, are taken in order, and the first that shows among the stems of the year, month or hour names the structure by its god; if none shows, the first of them does.
• The follow structures: when almost the whole chart supports the Day Master and no stem controls it, or when it holds almost nothing of its own, with no root and no helper, Ulune also flags the dominant or the following structure, and the favourable phases are read the other way round.
• In the table, the structure stands in the analysis rows with its characters, and links to its page.
• With strength: the same structure reads differently for a strong and a weak Day Master; the pages of each structure say how the classics weigh the two.

Across traditions

• In Japan and Korea the same frames are taught as kakkyoku and gyeokguk, with the same names: a seikan-kaku, a Direct Officer structure, in Japanese Shichū Suimei; a jeonggwan-gyeok in Korean saju.
• In Western astrology the nearest idea is the shape of a whole chart, Marc Edmund Jones’s bowls, bundles, buckets and seesaws, or its dominant planet: a frame for the chart drawn from the spread of the planets rather than from the month.

Origin and history

Structures are as old as the Zi Ping school. The Yuanhai Ziping of the Song names the standard frames after the gods of the month, and Wan Minying’s San Ming Tong Hui, in the 16th century, adds dozens of “outer” structures with picturesque names, many of them read from rare combinations. Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, cut the list back to the essentials with one principle, that the use-god is to be sought in the month alone, and sorted the gods into four to be supported, Wealth, the Officer, the Resource and the Eating God, and four forceful ones to be tempered, Seven Killings, the Hurting Officer, the partial Resource and the Sword Edge. Xu Lewu’s commentary of 1936 made the book the standard of modern teaching. The Di Tian Sui, with Ren Tieqiao’s commentary, prefers to read a chart by its balance and its “following” or “transforming” shapes, which is where the follow structures come from, and the two approaches still meet and argue in today’s books.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune follows the Ziping Zhenquan. It first compares the month branch with the Day Master’s Prosperity branch (the Prosperity structure) and, for a yang Day Master, with its Sword Edge (the Sword Edge structure). Otherwise it lists the month branch’s hidden stems in their order, main qi first, leaves out those of the Day Master’s own phase, and looks for each among the stems of the year, month and hour: the first found names the structure by its Ten God. If none is found, the first of the list does. The follow structures are flagged separately, from the balance: the dominant one when the Day Master’s own phase and the one producing it hold at least 80% of the chart’s points with no stem of power showing; a following one when they hold at most 20%, with no root and no helper among the stems, named after the strongest of output, wealth and power.

Correspondences