What Actually Fixes a Person’s Hour of Birth?

Translator's note. A reader in the West who has had a chart cast knows the experience: the practitioner asks for the minute of birth, sometimes the second, and if the hour is uncertain will “rectify” it — a procedure with no agreed method and a strong smell of guesswork. This essay argues that the whole demand for precision is a mistake, and that it was manufactured by practitioners who could not read accurately and needed something to blame. Three arguments are given, the third decisive: birth is a process, not an instant. What follows from it is that a chart at an hour boundary can be read either way and come out right.

Fixing the hour of birth was originally very simple. In the early days of the four pillars, and before there were four pillars at all, ordinary people settled the hour with a rhyme:

Midnight is zi; the cock crowing, chou; first light, yin; sunrise, mao; breakfast, chen; sun east of south, si; noon, wu; sun west of south, wei; the slanting sun, shen; sunset, you; dusk, xu; when people settle in, hai.

In the old world there were no accurate timepieces and no such thing as Beijing time — no “four fifty-two and thirty seconds in the afternoon” to be had anywhere. There was nothing to be precise with.

1. Why precision is not needed

Why should the hour need to be fixed to the minute or the second? What the earthly branch of the hour is has been set out elsewhere. But step back: the hour was determined by where the sun stood, rising or setting. That is, the hour records what kind of energy field a child received at the moment of birth — some received the energy of sunrise, some of the noon sun, some of sunset. That field has no precise boundary to divide it by. It is not that precise, and it does not need to be.

2. The argument from the clock

Here is the third reason, and the strongest.

Suppose one child is born at 6:59:59.99 in the afternoon and another at 7:00:01. Is there any difference between these two births? You may say: one is you hour, one is xu hour.

But then: what instrument are you timing with? Is it that accurate? Suppose it is an atomic clock and it is. Then I ask again: in a birth, natural or by caesarean, does the clock start when the child is entirely out, or when some part of the body first appears? Can you establish which? Either way, the fastest delivery takes minutes. A difficult labour takes hours, sometimes days. Birth is a process, not an instant. If the process straddles the line between you and xu, which hour was the child born in?

3. Who made it complicated

These are non-problems, and the masters have made them desperately complicated. Why? Because their theory is faulty. When a reading fails they do not suspect the theory; they blame the hour. Others invented “true solar time,” and still could not read accurately.

Before there were clocks, our ancestors read charts by the hour and read them accurately. Since clocks arrived, nobody reads accurately. That says we have made the hour too complicated, and that we no longer know what the hour means.

There is no strict boundary between hours. There never was, and there never will be. Confirming the hour has to match the facts. When a birth crosses from one hour into the next, whether you start counting when the head appears or when the whole body is out cannot be settled — and what scientific evidence do you have that it is the whole body? Masters routinely ignore the facts and commit the error of pure assertion: whatever they think, is. Who are you? Are you heaven? Can you decide the earth's revolution and rotation? Can you decide where the sun rises and sets? Can you decide wind and rain and thunder? If you can decide nothing, how is what you think correct?

So the hour is not a problem. There is no precise hour.

4. Beijing time is not local time

Beijing time and local time differ. A man whose birth certificate says seven in the morning: if he was born east of Beijing, read chen hour; if west of Beijing, read mao. Beijing time runs two hours ahead of Urumqi, half an hour ahead of the Xi'an–Taiyuan line, and more than half an hour ahead of Harbin. Watch for this when fixing the hour.

The traditional method of fixing a child's birth hour was to judge by the height of the sun — that is, by local time.

And the earth is a sphere. Outside the equator, sunrise and sunset times vary greatly both by latitude and by season at a single place. Not to grasp this, and to insist on pinning Beijing time onto the chart, is absurd in itself. Reading a fate should return to local time.

5. The consequence for boundary births

If a chart is read on the time system alone, a person born in chen hour and one born in si hour have very different fates. A failed reading then only proves that the theoretical system is at fault.

There is no precise boundary in this world — and birth in particular is a process, not a moment. No moment means no precise division of hours; no precise division means that for a child born at the boundary, a reading on either side is correct.

In our model, for a person born at the junction of two hours, reading with the earlier hour and reading with the later hour are both accurate. Why? Because the question is whether the fate-energy is expressed or not.

In essence, the year, month, day and hour of a chart are the relative positions of Jupiter, Saturn, the sun and the earth. A different chart means a different configuration of those four; a different configuration means every living thing on earth receives a different quantity of life's motive energy; a different quantity means a different fate. Now: a person born a tenth of a second before such a boundary and a person born a tenth of a second after — do you think their fates differ? They do not.

6. Changing the hour

Masters whose readings fail never say their theory is at fault. They change the hour instead. Any master who changes a client's hour is a fraud. Some clients give an hour that is certainly correct — especially children born in the modern era, where the record is exact. On what authority do you change it?

The hour is a simple matter that fraudulent masters have made complicated. The question is what the hour is, and what it means. Once that is clear, the whole business of true solar time and of seconds and minutes dissolves.

7. The zi hour

A person born at 22:59:59 and one born at 23:00:01: if you insist on distinguishing them, one is hai hour of the first day and one is zi hour of the second, and the charts differ entirely. On your theory the two fates differ greatly.

Read on our model, the hai reading of day one and the zi reading of day two come out the same. Where it is the same person, the fate is the same — because his fate-energy has a channel of release and a direction of expression, so no difference arises. And therefore the whole question of “night zi” and “early zi” does not arise either. That distinction was invented by people whose system was incomplete, who could not solve accuracy and so dragged it in — unwilling to say they were wrong, insisting the hour was at fault, looking for someone to take the blame. Once you understand the system, test it in practice: for the same person, a boundary hour read either way is right.

The ancients held that past eleven at night it is already zi of the next day. Their boundary was eleven, not midnight. “The third quarter of the wu hour” is twelve o'clock. It is we who insist on reading the old sayings with modern assumptions.

The great failing of readers today: when a reading is wrong, they always decide the client is at fault, never the theory.

We constantly push our own understanding back into the old books. We should read them historically — one of the five habits of thought I have set out for studying this field. The ancients' picture of the world and ours differ enormously.