Chiyang Daoren, Eastern Taoism
The Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches were gradually fixed by China's ancestors as their spoken and written language arose and evolved.
The origin of the characters for the stems and branches can be traced back 7,000 to 7,500 years. The rulers of the late Xia dynasty and of the Shang dynasty began to use the Heavenly Stems in their names. The divination inscriptions on oracle bones record days by stem and branch in great numbers, and there are tables of the sixty-pair cycle. This shows that the sixty-pair cycle had already taken shape by the late Xia. The Zhou dynasty called the ten Heavenly Stems the “ten days” and the twelve Earthly Branches the “twelve years,” “twelve months,” and “twelve chen.” In this way the stems and branches gradually took shape.
In 2697 BCE, the Yellow Emperor ordered Da Nao to investigate the workings of the qi of heaven and earth. Da Nao first created the ten Heavenly Stems—Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin, Ren, Gui—and the twelve Earthly Branches—Zi, Chou, Yin, Mao, Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Xu, Hai—and matched them with one another to form the sixty-pair cycle, used as symbols for recording years and months. The stems and branches were as simple as Arabic numerals; later people applied these symbols to maps, directions, and time, and so these “numbers” were given more and more meanings.
In the Xia calendar, one Heavenly Stem is paired with one Earthly Branch, stem first and branch second, the stems starting from Jia and the branches from Zi, yang stems with yang branches and yin stems with yin branches. This yields a sixty-year cycle of rotation known as the “sixty jiazi,” used to record the years, months, days, and hours. This provided the material basis for predicting a person's destiny through BaZi (Four Pillars of Destiny).
The emergence of the River Chart and the Luo Writing (Hetu and Luoshu), and of yin and yang and the Five Elements, provided the theoretical support for predicting destiny through BaZi. These theories are important cornerstones of ancient Chinese culture.
The appearance of the I Ching (Book of Changes) directly spurred the rise of the predictive arts. The numerology of the I Ching is drawn from the River Chart and the Luo Writing. The River Chart uses ten numbers to match the five directions, the Five Elements, yin and yang, and the images of heaven and earth. In the diagram, white circles are yang, heaven, and odd numbers; black dots are yin, earth, and even numbers. Heaven and earth are matched with the five directions, and yin and yang with the Five Elements. The structure of the diagram is as follows: one and six share a lineage and dwell in the north, because heaven's one generates Water and earth's six completes it; two and seven are companions and dwell in the south, because earth's two generates Fire and heaven's seven completes it; three and eight are friends and dwell in the east, because heaven's three generates Wood and earth's eight completes it; four and nine follow the same path and dwell in the west, because earth's four generates Metal and heaven's nine completes it; five and ten guard each other and dwell in the center, because heaven's five generates Earth and earth's ten completes it. The River Chart was drawn according to the seasons when the five planets appear and disappear.
Confucius, in the Spring and Autumn period, traveled through the various states in his early years promoting his political ideas everywhere. After meeting rebuff after rebuff, he came to see how mercilessly the god of fate toys with people, and so, past fifty, he sighed: “At fifty I knew the mandate of Heaven.” Yet Su Qin and Zhang Yi could summon wind and rain and sway the states at will. Was this not fate?
Mencius, in the Warring States period, went further: “What is done though no one does it is Heaven; what comes though no one brings it is fate.” By the Han dynasty, Confucian teaching prevailed throughout the land, and the idea of the mandate of Heaven took still deeper root in people's hearts. Dong Zhongshu, Yang Xiong, and others, as well as books such as the Huainanzi and the Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall (Baihu Tong), were without exception advocates or believers of the view of destiny. Wang Chong wrote in the “Fate and Emolument” chapter of the Balanced Discourses (Lunheng): “Fate is the master of good and ill fortune, the way of what is so of itself, a number that falls by chance; it is not made so by some other qi, by side efforts, by apotropaic magic, or by moving Heaven.”
From this view of the mandate of Heaven, there developed by the Han dynasty a method of fortune-telling by year, month, and day based on yin and yang, the Five Elements, and the heavenly and earthly stems and branches. This method was promoted and elaborated through the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern dynasties and was finally established in the Tang dynasty.
Li Xuzhong (762–813) of the Tang could determine the nobility or lowliness, long life or early death, and good or ill fortune of a person's whole life from the stems and branches of the year, month, day, and hour of birth. It was once held that Li Xuzhong used only the year, month, and day and not the double hour, but this view is now considered mistaken. Han Yu held him in the highest esteem: “He was most deeply versed in the books of the Five Elements. Taking the stems and branches of the day and chen that a person's year, month, and day of birth fell on, and weighing the images of mutual generation, conquest, decline, and death, he calculated people's long life or early death, nobility or lowliness, benefit or harm. Each time he would first set up the year and the hour, and out of a hundred he missed no more than one or two.” The “chen” of the day here, among the year, month, and day, is the hour. Li Xuzhong's readings were fairly accurate, and later generations call him the founding patriarch of BaZi destiny calculation.
Only after further development and refinement by Xu Ziping, of the Five Dynasties and early Song, did BaZi destiny calculation formally reach a mature and complete stage. Xu Ziping's greatest contribution to fortune-telling was to develop Li Xuzhong's method of calculating from the stems and branches of the year, month, and day into the “Four Pillars and Eight Characters” method, which predicts from year, month, day, and hour together. To commemorate his important contribution, people often call BaZi destiny calculation “the Ziping art.”
In the Song dynasty, Xu Dasheng compiled the book Yuanhai Ziping on the basis of Xu Ziping's research into destiny, one of the most important works in the history of BaZi destiny calculation. Although the exposition of Yuanhai Ziping is somewhat disorderly, its value lies in being the earliest book on destiny to complete the main theoretical system of BaZi. The book is concise and practical; its discussion of the Ten Gods such as Wealth, Officer, Resource, and Eating God is incisive, and its verses and rhapsodies are the very essence.
The Ming dynasty was the heyday of BaZi destiny calculation. Song Lian, a founding minister of the Ming, wrote the essay “On Emolument and Destiny,” which for the first time systematically summarized the historical sources of Chinese destiny studies. For a time, writings on destiny sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain, and theoretical achievement reached a peak. Well-known works of fairly high quality include Di Tian Sui, attributed to Liu Ji; Ziping Zhenquan by Shen Xiaozhan; Sanming Tonghui by Wan Minying; and Shenfeng Tongkao Mingli Zhenzong by Zhang Shenfeng. Of these, Wan Minying's Sanming Tonghui was the most influential.
Sanming Tonghui runs to twelve volumes, with a vast and sprawling system. It is magnificent in scope and collects many secret formulas of earlier BaZi masters; its naming and meanings of the Ten Gods, its auspicious and inauspicious stars (shensha), Na Yin, chart patterns, verses, and rhapsodies all show a distinctive vision. Wan Minying had earned the jinshi degree, which gave him advantages in compiling the book. Later, because of its well-chosen material and grand system, and its merit as a comprehensive compendium, the book was included in the divination section of the Masters category of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Siku Quanshu).
In the Qing dynasty, Ren Tieqiao and Xu Lewu each developed BaZi prediction in their own ways, though with fairly large shortcomings. In the Republican period, Yuan Shushan's Exploring the Origins of Destiny (Mingli Tanyuan) and Wei Qianli's Qianli's Destiny Manuscripts (Qianli Minggao) gave a positive push to the development of BaZi scholarship!
Once BaZi theory had taken shape, the scholarly school and the itinerant school developed in parallel, and within the itinerant school, the marvelously accurate predictions of blind fortune-tellers have fascinated people. Blind masters use mnemonic formulas handed down from master to disciple, combining the methods of images, principles, and techniques to judge people's good and ill fortune, long life, and early death. Their theories are scattered and disordered, making it hard to form a complete system. The secret books of the blind school known at present mainly include Tianjizi, Golden Bowl and Silver Spoon, Heart Classic of Nine Calculations, Milu Shicheng, Fuyu Xianzong, Wudao Shenzhi, Classic of a Hundred Bridges, Star-Plucking Hand, and Seven-Star Finger Method.
Researchers of destiny in every dynasty have drawn on, borrowed from, and merged with one another, making BaZi prediction ever richer and more complete.