What Do the Twelve Zodiac Animals Have to Do with the Earthly Branches?

Translator's note. Two things in this essay need flagging for a reader outside China. The “twelve zodiac animals” here are the twelve shengxiao — rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, pig — one per Earthly Branch, familiar to every Chinese child and, in the popular mind, a complete system of fortune-telling in itself. The author's target is not the animals but the assumption that the animals are the meaning of the Branches. The second thing is the argument's structure: the first half dismantles the animals, and the second half uses that dismantling to make a much larger point about all conceptual categories, including the ones practitioners treat as fixed rules.

First. That zi is a rat and chou is an ox is itself a crude misunderstanding.

In antiquity scientific knowledge was scarce. Had you told a peasant that zi refers to the stretch of sky through which Jupiter moves in a given direction, you would have made the idea impossible to hold and impossible to pass on. So the ancients married the Branches to animals and objects people already knew, and the Branches travelled through the culture on the back of familiar animals. Zi and chou and yin and mao reached the next generation because a rat and an ox and a tiger and a rabbit could be remembered.

Which is to say: a scientific idea may well need to borrow a non-scientific vehicle in order to spread.

So zi is not necessarily a rat. But turn it around. The fact that the ancestors paired zi with the rat and chou with the ox suggests a possibility worth taking seriously: that they had grasped something real. Perhaps the energy state inside a rat's body is consistent with the energy arriving from the zi direction. Having seen that, they paired the animal with the direction, so that we could grasp what the concept zi refers to. The same reasoning applies to chou and the ox.

Second. Every concept is a human judgement.

Had the ancestors paired chou with the rat and yin with the ox, we would now be saying that chou is the rat and yin is the ox. That, too, would simply be a convention.

Take Metal. Everything with a killing, withering function is assigned to Metal. That assignment is also a correspondence. But had the ancestors decided that everything with a killing, withering function belongs to Fire, we could still do readings today, and they would still be accurate. Concepts are human stipulations.

We must not let concepts block our enquiry into the world. We have to see what lies underneath a concept. And students of the Yijing are deceived by concepts constantly. What we see is the concept itself, or the concept's literal sense, and we never ask what is underneath.

So in practice, when we meet xing, chong, he and hai — punishment, clash, combination, harm — we say combination is good and clash is bad, and punishment and harm are bad too. But go back to what these relations actually are — generation, control, punishment, clash, combination, harm, storage — and you find that punishment and harm, clash and combination, only state what the relation between one thing and another is.

Clash means opposition. Opposition is not necessarily bad. Sometimes opposition is excellent.

Cutting you with a knife sounds bad. But give a man liver cancer and he will beg the surgeon to cut the liver out. Clash itself carries no auspice. What matters is whether the clash carries away energy you need or energy you do not, whether it carries away a beneficent part of you or a malefic one. Only then can you say whether that clash is good or bad for you.

We all say combination is good. Combine a cancer into you — combine cancer cells into every organ in your body, combine poison into your stomach — and it is not good at all. Combine money into your chart, or an official post, and it is not necessarily auspicious either, because it depends how much money and how senior the post. If a hundred tons of gold is combined into your chart and you have to catch it at the foot of the building, then the wealth has arrived and you are dead.

Wealth is a good thing. What matters is whether what comes in is your yongshen — the useful spirit, the element your chart needs — or your jishen, the element it must avoid.

And yet we do a whole reading off a single he or a single chong. We see a xing or a hai and the verdict is already in.

Here is a car bearing down on you. I shove you, or I kick you, and you dodge. My shove and my kick were a xing and a hai — and that punishment saved your life. Now suppose instead that I pull you back into the car's path. My pull was a he, a combination — and that combination killed you. Is combination still good?

So xing, chong, he and hai only describe a relation between two things, or between two energies. As for auspice: you have to ask which of the two dominates and which submits, whether what dominates is auspicious or not, whether what is dominated is auspicious or not. Only then do you know whether the punishment, the clash, the combination, the harm is auspicious or not.

But for several thousand years nobody has reasoned this way. See xing or hai or chong, and the judgement is already made. That habit of thought is precisely why we have been unable to get to the bottom of what human fate is.

From now on, do not assume that xing, hai and chong are bad. If the old habit of thought does not change, you will never understand what fate is.