Handbook · 手册
Handbook · 手册
Five thousand years of Chinese metaphysics, drawn as ten interactive visualizations. No prior knowledge required - every Chinese name has its English partner. Each visualization is a door. Tap to explore, walk through to the full guide when you are ready.
Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water - arranged in a pentagon. Two cycles flow through the same five nodes: production (生) along the perimeter, control (克) through the interior star. Every element produces one, controls one, is produced by one, is controlled by one. A closed network.
You already know astrology. A sun sign tells you you are a Libra. A zodiac year tells you you are a Dragon. One variable, twelve possible values, six hundred million people share your answer.
BaZi uses the same impulse - read the sky at the moment you were born - but samples eight variables instead of one. The resolution is not a little better. It is a hundred million times better.
The eight variables come from four pillars. Each pillar represents a different layer of time at your birth - a different resolution of the sky above and the self below. Tap any pillar to see what it carries.
Ten heavenly stems, five elements, each split into Yang and Yin polarity. Yang on the outer ring, Yin on the inner. Your Day Master sits in one of these ten positions - and every other stem you meet in your chart is read in relation to it.
Not ten deities. Ten relationships - every other stem in your chart, relative to your Day Master, takes on one of ten roles. Pick a Day Master below; the wheel re-labels to show what each element becomes when it meets that center.
Twelve rooms around the perimeter of a 4×4 grid - each one a domain of life. Career, Wealth, Partnership, Parents, Health, and so on. Together they map every area your life has to move through.
Which room sits where is not arbitrary. Your Life Palace anchors to the position set by your birth month and birth hour. The other eleven palaces rotate into their positions from there, fixed in sequence. Every chart gets all twelve, but in a different arrangement - and the arrangement is what makes your chart yours.
Palaces do not stand alone. Every palace has an opposition - the palace directly across the grid, representing the force that pulls against it. Every palace also has a triangle - two partner palaces that complete a three-way alliance. A palace is read together with its opposition and its triangle, never alone. Tap any palace to see its structural conversation.
Fourteen main stars operate inside ZWDS charts - not fourteen balls of gas, but fourteen archetypes. Each one a distinct character that shows up in one of your twelve palaces when your chart is drawn.
The fourteen split into two families. The Emperor family - led by Emperor himself (紫微) - carries authority, movement, command. The Treasury family - led by Treasury (天府) - carries resources, accumulation, continuity. A chart has all fourteen stars somewhere, but their distribution across palaces is what makes you you.
The star in your Life Palace is your central character. The star in your Career Palace shows what kind of work calls you. The star in your Wealth Palace shows how money moves through you. Same star, different palace, completely different reading. Tap any star to meet the archetype.
Twelve phases cycling through every life. Not random - they follow a biological sequence, the same one a tree or a star or a person moves through. Birth, growing up, taking authority, peaking, declining, dying, composting underground, being conceived again.
The twelve phases group into three zones - four phases each. Growth (First Steps → Cleansing → Preparation → Window Opens → Peak) is life expanding into its peak. Decline (Decline → Weakness → Dormancy → Vault) is the slow compression back to ground. Underground (Extinction → Conception → Nourishment) is the dark regenerative work before the next cycle begins.
In a BaZi reading, your chart's element and your birth year stem together decide which phase you were born into. Every decade, you move one phase forward. So your life literally is a season - and the season changes on schedule. Tap any phase to see its character, and see its opposite phase across the wheel.
Every year has a Heavenly Stem - the same ten-stem cycle that underpins everything in BaZi. That year stem activates four energies in your chart, each one attaching to a specific star. The four energies are Fortune (化禄 - blessing, opportunity), Authority (化权 - power, command), Reputation (化科 - recognition, reputation), and Obstruction (化忌 - friction, stuck energy).
Read the year like this - "This year my Fortune is going to the star in my Wealth Palace, so money will move. My Authority is landing on the star in my Career Palace - I'm being given power at work. My Reputation is in my Travel Palace - my name is known when I move. My Obstruction is on the star in my Inner Palace - I'll feel blocked emotionally." Four clear questions: where am I blessed this year, where am I in charge, where am I recognized, where am I stuck.
Scrub across the ten stems below. Watch where the four forces land, and notice that the spatial relationship between them - the lines connecting Fortune to Obstruction, Authority to Reputation - shifts with each stem. That geometry is the year's weather for you.
One honest note - the mapping from stem to star positions is not a clean left-to-right progression you can predict by eye. It was memorized and refined over centuries of observation. What you're looking for as you scrub is not a pattern but a shape: do your four forces cluster together this year (concentrated energy, focused events), or do they spread wide across the grid (scattered, complex, many concurrent storylines)? A tight cluster in one quadrant means the year pulls you toward one area of life. A spread means everything moves at once.
Every hexagram is two trigrams stacked - three broken or solid lines, then three more. Eight trigrams times eight makes sixty-four. The grid below holds the complete map: upper trigram across the top, lower trigram down the side. Every possible six-line figure has its cell.
The claim behind this system - made most clearly by Professor Zeng Shiqiang (曾仕强 Zēng Shìqiáng), modern China's best-known interpreter of the I Ching - is that these sixty-four hexagrams together describe every situation a human life can meet. Beginnings, stuckness, prosperity, loss, retreat, return, breakthrough, stagnation, gathering, dispersion. The trigrams are the eight fundamental forces; stacking them produces the sixty-four conditions those forces can combine into. Nothing new happens to us, the claim goes - only one of these sixty-four, arriving again.
Where to start, if sixty-four feels like a wall - start with the two that sit directly across from each other on every teacher's lips: Hexagram 11, Peace (泰) where earth sits above heaven and everything flows easily, and Hexagram 12, Standstill (否) where the same forces are reversed and nothing moves. Those two are the poles. Once you feel them, you can navigate the rest.
Tap any cell to open the full hexagram page.
Twelve animals - each one tied to a year of the twelve-year cycle, to one of the twelve earthly branches, and to one of the five elements. Rat is water and the first year. Horse is fire, directly across. The wheel below arranges all twelve in the order they come up, color-coded by element.
Three different relationship systems live between them. The names are traditional so they count things differently - here's what each one actually describes:
Triple Harmony (三合 Sān Hé) - alliances of three animals that share the same element-energy and cooperate naturally. Four such triangles exist across the wheel. The name "three" refers to the number of animals in each alliance. Your triangle partners are the people your life flows with easily.
Paired Union (六合 Liù Hé) - six pairs where two animals lock together as complementary opposites, like matching halves. The "six" refers to the number of pair-units total. Your union partner is your structural complement - different from you, but your missing piece.
Direct Clash (六冲 Liù Chōng) - six pairs sitting exactly opposite each other on the wheel, in direct tension. Again six pairs total. Your clash partner is where the friction lives - not enemies, but the animal whose energy wants what yours wants, from the other side.
In compatibility readings - parent and child, partners, team members - these three systems decide who flows with whom, who completes whom, and where the friction sits. Tap any animal to see its full network.
Your chart is waiting. Open a free reading and the ten doors become doors into yourself.
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