Zǐ Nǚ

子女 is the fourth palace, three steps backward from 命宮, and facing it across the chart is 田宅. Like many palaces it can hold no main star at all in a given chart, and the calculator then simply shows it empty of main stars. The body palace can never fall here, since the rule that places it only lands on every second palace.

子女 means sons and daughters, and this is one of the few sections that opens with a method. It says to read the stars in this palace, then the palace opposite for any clash, and, where this palace is empty, the opposite palace alone, as the quoted line says. Reading it more broadly, for example for creative work or for those a person looks after, is modern use with no basis in this section. The calculator prints the stars here and says nothing about whether anyone has or will have children.

Much of the list is arithmetic: a count of offspring for each star and companion. Its vocabulary shows what the old writers cared about, with 祀子, a son brought in to carry on the family rites, 庶生, children of a secondary wife, and 送终, the duty of seeing a parent to the grave. Some entries speak flatly of a family line ending. Those lines belong to a world where a lineage was a household's main concern, and they appear here only as a description of what the old text was doing.