What Exactly Are the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches? (Part 2)

Translator's note. This part carries the author's central claim: that the sexagenary cycle is not a clock but a description of a physical configuration in the solar system. The astronomical arithmetic here — Jupiter's twelve-year period, Saturn's thirty, the sixty-year least common multiple, the five-year Jupiter–Saturn–Sun alignment — is the author's own reading, offered as support for a traditional system rather than as a contribution to astronomy. Readers should take it as an argument, not as a citation. The Chinese original remains the authority.

In Taiyuan I met a professor who told me the Yijing is not a science. I told him plainly that the Yijing operates on two levels: one philosophical, one natural-scientific. The Yijing itself is not a natural science, but Yijing prediction is a hundred per cent natural science. Anyone with modern scientific training knows that prediction requires a model, and a model requires a system; you reason inside that system and arrive at a prediction about the future. Building a model requires data. Without data you cannot build a model; without logical relations you cannot build one either. Every predictive discipline, therefore, is built on data and on strict logical relations. How could strict logical relations and concrete data be philosophy?

When I had finished, the professor shut up. People who hold his view have a problem with how they think.

The same is true of the Stems and Branches. When we analyse a Bazi chart it looks as though we are analysing a time system — but that is only because we do not know what the Stems and Branches specifically mean. First, we know that they stand for four things. Second, we have to ask what they actually are. They are not time at all.

For our purposes, in a Bazi chart, they mean precisely this: what manner of motion, and what intensity of motion, fills the body of a person born at this moment.

Why say that? We have to explain where the Stems and Branches came from.

The twelve Earthly Branches

Our ancients said it plainly: these are the twelve segments of Jupiter's orbit around the Sun. Jupiter takes about twelve of our years to go round once, so our ancestors divided the distance Jupiter travels into twelve parts and assigned a distance to each. What happens in the Zi segment, the Chou segment, the Yin segment is entirely different.

What has Jupiter's orbit to do with Earth? I do not know why our ancestors defined it this way. But modern astrophysics and astronomy happen to vindicate both the wisdom and the strange habit of mind of the Chinese ancients. Modern science shows that without Jupiter — or with Jupiter removed from the solar system — Earth would be a sheet of fire where nothing grows. Every day we would take incoming meteor strikes generating disasters equivalent to countless atomic bombs, and no life of any kind could exist here.

Jupiter draws 99.9 per cent of the radiation in the cosmos, and of the meteors and planets inside the solar system that might strike Earth, onto its own surface — or, under its enormous gravity, flings them back out into space. Jupiter keeps these world-ending energies, physical and radiant alike, away from us. Jupiter is what protects all life on Earth.

Why, with so many planets available, did the ancients fix on Jupiter? That is the wisdom of the Chinese ancients, and we their descendants have distorted it. Only modern science tells us that without Jupiter there would be no life on Earth.

Jupiter's position changes its effect on Earth completely. The influence on all life of Jupiter moving through the Zi sector is entirely different from its influence in Chou or Yin. This is why a zodiac sign alone, without a full chart, can sometimes read a life correctly.

But the zodiac alone cannot be right every time. What it gives you is the fate shared by everyone born under that sign — the common part. “Common” means that while Jupiter moves through Zi, it exerts a common influence on all life on Earth. But people live in different environments. When it rains, one person is indoors, one holds an umbrella, one is out in it. The same rain affects all three differently — and yet all three are affected; only the size and the manner of the effect differ.

That is why the zodiac can be right and cannot be right. It cannot be right because every person on Earth has a particular living environment, and that is what produces the difference between fates. It can be right because everyone lives on Earth, and everyone receives the influence of the rain.

Saturn, and where the sixty come from

Why the ancients fixed on Saturn is another puzzle. Modern science tells us that what most affects human life is neither the Sun nor the Moon but Saturn.

Because the influence of Sun and Moon on Earth is a balanced system, and a balanced system needs no attention paid to it. Solar radiation does affect Earth, but constantly and evenly — again like a balanced system. Whether people on Earth are irradiated to death is decided by Saturn and Jupiter. Remove Jupiter and Saturn and the Sun's radiation kills everyone; no life survives. So where Saturn and Jupiter sit governs, severely, how solar radiation affects life and how life changes.

That is why the ancients fixed on Saturn and Jupiter. Modern science holds that the Jupiter–Saturn system decides whether life on Earth can exist at all. Which way life on Earth develops is not decided by the Sun and Moon, because their influence is balanced — whereas the Jupiter–Saturn system's influence is not. It changes with position.

Which is to say: the Chinese ancients' notion of “nine stars in a line” is not necessarily inauspicious, nor necessarily auspicious. That is an astronomical question. But we know Saturn takes about thirty years to go round the Sun. Take the least common multiple with Jupiter's twelve, and you see where the sixty-term cycle comes from.

You also see why there is “Jia combines with Ji, Yi with Geng; Jia clashes with Geng, Yi with Xin”: every five years, Jupiter, Saturn and the Sun fall on a single line. If Jupiter and Saturn are on opposite sides of the Sun, that is a clash (chong). If they are on the same side, that is a combination (he). That is where the “clash” and “combination” of the Heavenly Stems come from.

And for Earth, whether those three bodies lie on one line, or Jupiter and Saturn sit on opposite sides of the Sun, makes an entirely different difference.

So people born in a Jiazi year and a Yichou year differ enormously, both in the direction of their fate and in its substance. Because when Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun and Earth sit in a given configuration, everyone on Earth receives the same energy — but because the terrain and landforms of Earth's surface vary, and people live in different environments, that same energy acting on one particular person varies in intensity and in mode. That is what produces the difference in fate between people born in the same year.

By this point, do you still think “Jiazi, Yimao, Bingyin, Dingchou” is a time?

A person born in a Jiazi year has a different form of particle-clustering in the body from one born in a Yichou year. Take an example. In a Jiazi-year person the particles cluster hand-in-hand, in rings. In a Yichou-year person they cluster back-to-back, in heaps. Different formation, different pattern. When a car ploughs into the pattern, different people are injured and the disorder takes a different shape.

So the Stems and Branches of our birth moment are not time. They mean what form the particle-clustering in our body takes. That is the root of it.

If you think it is a time, then do not expect to read a fate accurately — or a hexagram, or to adjust a feng shui correctly. Every practitioner who has adjusted a client's house is afraid to answer the client's phone afterwards, afraid the client will come after him, because he does not know whether the method worked. He only followed what the book said, or improvised something out of thin air, so he dreads the phone. He cannot answer it and he cannot sleep. Only when whatever was going to happen to the client has happened does the stone in his chest come down. Or else he cheats the client, and the client never contacts him again. Occasionally he gets one or two right, boasts loudly of his skill — and never mentions the ones he killed.

That is the psychology and the behaviour of this profession.

When you understand what the Stems and Branches essentially are, what relation they bear to the ten thousand things, and how they act on one another, then the feng shui adjustments we prescribe and the plans we make for remaking a fate will, if the client carries them out, reach the goal within the time frame we specify. That is the difference between science and superstition.

A person has cancer. A psychologist who has talked with you for an hour will never guarantee whether you recover. A physician can tell you, with real accuracy, whether you will be alive in three months. The psychologist cannot and would not, because all he has is psychological analysis and inference — he has not seen the nature of the world. He treats appearances. The physician knows through test data and a large body of clinical experience. The scientist goes to the essence.