What Is the Physical Nature of the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches?

Translator's note. This piece closes the tiangan dizhi series. Everything before it described what the Stems and Branches are; this one argues what they are made of — energy arriving from particular directions at particular times — and why that three-part definition is the difference between a reading that works and one that only appears to. The last third opens the door to the three practice lines that follow: Bazi charts, liuyao divination, and feng shui. The specific birth-year claims in the middle (1967, 1987, 1963) are the author's own empirical generalisations; he offers no dataset, and we have translated them as claims rather than findings.

The Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches are, in themselves, nothing but symbols. So where did the twelve Earthly Branches come from? The ancients arrived at them by watching the sky. Jupiter takes roughly twelve years to complete one orbit around the Sun, so they gave each segment of Jupiter's journey a name: zi, chou, yin, mao, and so on.

There are two kinds of matter in the universe. One is debris — rock, dust, the scattered fragments of everything that ever broke. The other is the solar wind, which is not wind at all but matter blasted outward when the Sun explodes. If Jupiter did not stand in the way of the material moving through the solar system, there would be no life on Earth at all, because Jupiter blocks 99% of the objects that would otherwise threaten it.

Jupiter's position changes its effect on Earth. And because that effect changes, the fate of the people, animals and plants born in a zi year, a chou year, a yin year, a mao year — each is different.

Why different? Because the intensity of the cosmic energy they receive differs, and the manner in which that energy acts on them differs. Put simply: it is the difference between cutting something lengthwise and cutting it crosswise.

Why can a single zodiac animal still produce an accurate reading? Because people born in the same year share common features of fate. This is the whole reason the old street practitioners could hit a target with nothing but a birth year — people born in the same year share a common fate signature.

Think of it this way. It is raining today. If all of us are standing in the courtyard, do we not share a common fate? Yes — we all get wet. Now suppose the sky is clear and we are all out in the courtyard again: our common feature is that we are all in sunlight. But the intensity of light each of us receives is not the same. Why?

I am under the eaves, so I get less. You are lying down and I am standing up — the person lying down catches more light, the one standing catches less, and someone crouching catches less still. That is your own posture. Then there is your surroundings: I have opened an umbrella, you are indoors, he is inside the Great Buddha Hall. Three different intensities, and three different modes of action — scattered light, direct light, reflected light, refracted light.

If you understand the energy of the harmonized yin–yang qi (yin-yang chonghe zhi qi) arriving from the cosmos as being like sunlight, then Jupiter is the umbrella, or the house. In different positions, life on Earth receives a different influence from cosmic energy. That is why people born in the same year share a common fate signature — and also differ enormously.

So why are their fates not identical?

Because each person's own environment is not identical. The Earth is not a flat plane; it is uneven. Two people born in the same year were carried by mothers standing on different terrain, so the cosmic energy reaching the fetus differed in intensity and in mode of action. Hence: shared signature, enormous difference. And the reason a zodiac animal can produce a hit is that what it captures is precisely the shared part.

Saturn takes about thirty years to circle the Sun. The ten Heavenly Stems are what you get when you divide the influence of Jupiter and Saturn's relative positions, across different periods, into ten equal parts and name them.

Every five years the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn fall into a straight line. That is the Five Combinations of the Stems.

Where does the sixty-year cycle come from? It is the least common multiple of 12 and 30. Every sixty years, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and the Sun hold their reunion. Within those sixty years, the energy Earth receives in any given year — in any given moment — is never the same twice.

So the energy a fetus receives in the womb is never the same. And because the point of origin differs, even twins do not receive identical energy, which is why twins also differ in fate.

Everyone born in a given year carries a certain shared energy body — and it is genuinely quite different from the body carried by people born in another year. For example:

• Women born in 1967, year of the Goat (dingwei): ninety percent are divorced. Of those who are not, the marriage is generally unhappy; they are getting by. The cosmic energy of a dingwei year is an energy that does not permit them to be happy with a husband.
• Men born in 1987, year of the Rabbit: most are useless. The women born that year, by contrast, are mostly outstanding — each one sharper than the last.
• Women born in 1970: uniformly excellent.
• Women born in 1963, guimao year: most become entrepreneurs, and even in a village they are the capable sort. Men born in 1963 are thoroughly ordinary.

This is why traditional fortune-telling can also produce hits. Is it calculating? No. It is picking up patterns.

The Stems and Branches represent energy, more than anything else. Jia is the energy of jia. Zi is the energy of zi. Yi is the energy of yi. Jiazi is the energy of jiazi; yimao is the energy of yimao. What they represent is a form of energy.

You may object: isn't fortune-telling just stringing jiazi, yichou, bingyin, dingmao together into a chart?

Yes. But the Stems and Branches do not represent time alone. The Stems and Branches of a chart are merely the instrument by which we record the process of a thing arising, developing and changing — because time itself has no mass and no weight, and time does not exist apart from matter. When we say “the jiazi year,” jiazi is a time. But is it the time that acts, or the specific combination of Jupiter, Saturn and the Sun that acts? It is the structure that acts, not the time. Saying “the jiazi year” is simply more convenient than saying “that particular structural combination.”

So when a student of fate says: “someone born in a jiazi year meeting wuxu means jia wood controls wu earth, and xu earth in turn controls zi water” — if that is how you think about chart reading, you will never become a master. We should reason like this instead: someone born in a jiazi year carries within their life a certain mode of energy. What happens to that mode of energy when it meets the energy of wuxu?

What happens to a watermelon dropped in boiling water? What happens to a watermelon put in a freezer? That is how you should be thinking, and only then can you actually read accurately.

Take it further. The Sun–Jupiter–Saturn combination of a wuxu year is a freezer. A person born in a jiazi year is a hot-water bottle. Wuxu is the freezer. When you put the jiazi hot-water bottle into the freezer, the heat of that bottle ceases to exist — and depending on which position in the freezer you put it, after twenty minutes the rate at which it loses heat, and the shape of the ice it becomes, will differ.

The reason a reading can be accurate is that there is a shared factor between them. So is it only time? No — position matters too, and position is the same thing as direction of movement. A person born in a jiazi year has been put into the freezer, yes — but which direction, which corner of the freezer decides their fate entirely differently. And if there is a pile of cotton batting next to them in there, then after twenty minutes the bottle taken out will be in a completely different state than one without cotton beside it. Which brings in the question of environment.

So you must grasp all three at once: this person born in a jiazi year, at the time of wuxu, has moved to which direction on Earth, and into what kind of environment. Only with those three factors can you say what this person's fate is this year, and what changes it will bring.

If you assume that a hot-water bottle put into a freezer must freeze into ice, you may well be wrong — because my bottle has a heating element, and it is plugged in, charging the whole time. The end result may be that the freezer stops being cold and becomes warm instead. Yet every traditional chart reader today believes he reads accurately. Why does he hit? He is reading only the shared part. He has accurately read the outcome for the hot-water bottles that went into the freezer without being plugged in. For the ones that were charging, he has no reading at all.

Whether you study fate calculation or hexagram divination, whenever you use the Stems and Branches, do not treat them as “just time.” They are time, and direction, and energy. If “energy” feels too vague, call it thing, direction, time — only when the three are joined as one can you predict precisely. Only then can you actually adjust a person's fate and relieve their misfortune. Otherwise, any relief you deliver was coincidence — which is exactly what those masters mean when they say, “my own fate is good, so whatever I adjust works.”

In feng shui, the energy arriving from the jia direction, from the mao direction, and from the yi direction has a completely different effect on the same point of origin.

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