How it works

Everything in this section belongs to one of three layers, and the pages try to keep them apart.

The first is the named book: what a specific old text prints. The second is the calculator: small arithmetic in your browser that applies a printed rule to any date or year, including years the book never reached. The third is modern practice: what people commonly say and sell today. Where modern practice has no old text behind it that we could check, we say so, and mostly leave it out.

The birth palace, the groups and the eight positions come from 陽宅十書, a Ming manual on houses, as reprinted in 古今圖書集成, the imperial encyclopedia printed from 1726 to 1728. The nine stars and their charts come from 星厯考原 (1713) and 協紀辨方書 (1741). We read the typed Wikisource texts of these works, and they have not been proofread against a scan.

We could not obtain 八宅明鏡, 陽宅三要, 八宅周書 or 沈氏玄空學, so nothing here is credited to them, although modern writing on the subject often cites them.

陽宅十書 calls it 福元 or 福德宮. The word 命卦 appears later, in a different context. It is read from the birth year and from one of two tables the book prints, one for men and one for women, which is why the finder labels the choice as the book's two tables.

The years run in a cycle of 180, made of three yuan of sixty years. 星厯考原 fixes 1684, a 甲子 year, as the start of an upper yuan. The book prints a palace for each of the 180 years from 1504 to 1683. Later years follow from its rule. Each yuan starts on a set palace, and the male table counts down one palace a year while the female table counts up:

When the count lands on 5, the center, the book lodges it in 坤 for the male table and in 艮 for the female table.

星厯考原 also prints a second list of starting palaces, used for matching marriages, set one yuan out of step with this one. Its editors say that use has no sound reasoning, and it is not used here.

A popular shortcut adds the digits of the birth year, then subtracts from 11 or adds 4. It gives the same answer as the table for every year we tested, from 1504 to 2100. It appears in no old text we could check. The calculator here works from the table's rule and does not use it.

The calculator starts the solar year at 立春, the solar term that opens spring, which falls around February 4. That is a convention, and we disclose it as one. No old sentence we could check says that the birth palace or the nine-star year changes there. 協紀辨方書 makes 立春 the opening term of the first month, and the month-star table begins at that month, which is indirect support and no more.

The date is read as a calendar date in China standard time, as in our zodiac finder. 立春 happens at a moment during its day, so a date alone cannot settle a birth on that day. The finder shows both sides, before and after the changeover, and does not guess.

The book puts 震, 巽, 坎, 離 in the East four (東四位) and 乾, 坤, 艮, 兌 in the West four (西四位).

The eight positions come from the eight lines of the 大遊年 verse: 生氣, 延年, 天乙, 伏位, 禍害, 六煞, 五鬼, 絕命. The calculator reads each line through the other seven palaces in the fixed order 乾, 坎, 艮, 震, 巽, 離, 坤, 兌. That order is our way of laying out the verse. It reproduces the book's worked example for 乾, it matches all 28 palace pairs listed in 協紀辨方書 卷二, and it comes out symmetric: if one palace gives a name to another, the second gives the same name back. The palaces take their compass directions from the later-heaven arrangement of the 說卦傳.

陽宅十書 attaches outcomes to these names, some of them about illness, death and lawsuits. Those are the book's claims, and these pages do not present them as facts or forecasts. 陽宅十書 treats 伏位 and 福德 as one position, and 協紀辨方書 卷二 names it 伏位輔弼.

One of the eight positions is also written 天醫, the Heavenly Doctor. 陽宅十書, the house manual we could check, calls it 天乙, the Heavenly One. 天醫 is not a modern invention: 協紀辨方書 卷二 says the star of this position is also called by that name, and an older marriage list quoted later in the same book uses it too. These pages keep the name the house manual uses.

The nine stars are 一白, 二黑, 三碧, 四綠, 五黃, 六白, 七赤, 八白, 九紫, one for each square of the Lo Shu. Their home squares are 坎, 坤, 震, 巽, 中, 乾, 兌, 艮, 離.

In the year chart the center star is 一白 at the 1684 anchor and falls by one star each year. The stars then move through the squares in the order 中, 乾, 兌, 艮, 離, 坎, 坤, 震, 巽, as in the worked example for 1684 in 星厯考原. The grid is drawn with south at the top, as in Chinese practice, and each square carries its compass name.

For the month chart, the first month's center star depends on the year's branch: 八白 in 子, 午, 卯, 酉 years, 五黃 in 辰, 戌, 丑, 未 years and 二黑 in 寅, 申, 巳, 亥 years. It falls one star a month, and the months are those of the solar terms, the first opening at 立春.

This chart is a calendar table from these two books. It is not a flying-star reading of a house, which belongs to a different school.

The 20-year Period scheme, with its Period 9 said to begin in 2024, has no source we could check, so it is not shown. The texts we have give three yuan of sixty years. In that cycle the lower yuan runs from 1984 to 2043.

The old books we could check give no modern remedy items of the kinds sold today, and we list none.

These pages say nothing about which way to face, where to sleep, what to build or whether to move.

The calculator was compared with all 180 entries of the table in 陽宅十書, both columns, read out of the stored text separately from the code. The eight positions were compared with the table read from the verse, and the year and month charts with the tables in 星厯考原 卷二. The stored text is the typed Wikisource one, so an error in that typing would pass through.