How your chart is cast

The original rule for placing the Life Palace

The "An Shen Ming Li" (Placing Body and Life) in volume two of the *Quan Shu* says:

For everyone, start the first month at Yin and count forward to the birth month; from the birth month, start the Zi hour and count backward to the birth hour to place Life, and forward to the birth hour to place Body.

In plain terms, three steps:

1. Treat the Yin cell as the first month and move clockwise one cell per month until you reach your lunar birth month.
2. In that cell, switch to counting hours: call it the Zi hour and move counterclockwise one cell per double-hour until you reach your birth hour. Where you stop is the Life Palace.
3. From the same birth-month cell, count clockwise to your birth hour. Where you stop is the Body Palace.

Let's try it: born in the fourth lunar month, in the You hour. Counting from Yin to the fourth month lands on Si. Start the Zi hour at Si and count counterclockwise to You: you stop at Shen, so the Life Palace is in Shen. Count clockwise to You instead and you stop at Yin, so the Body Palace is in Yin. The book gives its own example: born in the first month in the Zi hour, both Life and Body are in Yin. People born in the Zi or Wu hour land in the same cell going either way, which is called "Life and Body in the same palace".

The Five Elements Bureau

The Life Palace cell has its own stem and branch. Look that pair up in the "Na Yin Song of the Sixty Jia Zi" and the element you get is your Five Elements Bureau: Water 2, Wood 3, Metal 4, Earth 5 or Fire 6. The book's example is a Life Palace of Bing Yin, whose Na Yin is "fire in the furnace", so it's a Fire Bureau.

The bureau number does two things: together with your birth day it locates Zi Wei, and it sets the age your first Decade Luck begins. Water 2 starts at two, Fire 6 at six, and the Decade Luck moves one cell every ten years after that.

How Zi Wei finds its seat

The *Quan Shu* draws a table for each bureau, with a rhyme for looking up which cell your birth day corresponds to. For example, the book says that for the Fire Bureau, born on the first day of the first month, "the first day starts at You, so Zi Wei starts at You".

The tables are hard to memorize, so most teachers today use a division rule:

1. Divide your lunar birth day by the bureau number. If it divides evenly, count that many cells from Yin (Yin is cell one).
2. If it doesn't, add the smallest number that makes it divide evenly, and count the quotient from Yin.
3. If the number you added is odd, step back counterclockwise by that many cells; if it's even, step forward clockwise by that many.

Check it with the book's example: Fire 6, first day. You need to add 5 to make it divisible by 6, giving a quotient of 1, which lands on Yin. Since 5 is odd, step back five cells counterclockwise from Yin, to You. It matches the original.

Once Zi Wei is placed, the other main stars follow the "rhyme of the Northern and Southern Dipper stars": counterclockwise from Zi Wei come Tian Ji, Tai Yang, Wu Qu, Tian Tong and Lian Zhen; Tian Fu sits in the mirror position across the Yin-Shen line from Zi Wei, and clockwise from it come Tai Yin, Tan Lang, Ju Men, Tian Xiang, Tian Liang, Qi Sha and Po Jun. So everyone with Zi Wei in the same cell has the same layout of all fourteen main stars. There are only twelve such layouts, which Chapter 2 covers in detail.

Life Master and Body Master

The Life Master is set by the branch of your Life Palace and the Body Master by the branch of your birth year; each is a star. The "Placing the Life Master" section of volume two begins "Tan Lang for Zi; Ju Men for Chou and Hai", meaning that if your Life Palace is in Zi, your Life Master is Tan Lang. The Life Master is often described as your innate base color, and the Body Master as the direction you put more into as life goes on. They are stars, not cells on the chart, so don't confuse the Body Master with the Body Palace.

Details about hours and months

• Late Zi hour: 11 p.m. to midnight. Xingge follows most chart software and counts it as the next day's Zi hour, moving the date to the next day as well. Some teachers count it as the same day.
• Leap months: the *Quan Shu* says someone born in a leap first month should have Body and Life placed as if in the second month, meaning leap months always count as the following month. A common practice today is to count the first fifteen days of a leap month as the previous month and the sixteenth day on as the following month. Xingge uses this latter approach.
• Hour boundaries: if you were born within a few minutes of the change between two double-hours, both charts are worth a look. Pick the one that reads more like you.

If you don't know your birth hour, that's fine. Xingge's birth-hour questionnaire can find the most likely answer to start with; just read an estimated chart a little more loosely.