Placing the Life and Body Palaces

Placing Life and Body uses only two numbers, the lunar birth month and the birth hour; the year and the day are not needed yet. A worked example: born in the third month in the Mao hour. The first month starts at Yin; count forward, Mao is the second month and Chen the third, so stop at Chen. Start the Zi hour at Chen and count backward: Zi at Chen, Chou at Mao, Yin at Yin, Mao at Chou, so the Life Palace is in Chou. Likewise, start the Zi hour at Chen and count forward: Zi at Chen, Chou at Si, Yin at Wu, Mao at Wei, so the Body Palace is in Wei. The first month starts at Yin because the Xia calendar takes the Yin month as the first month.

On a Xingge chart the Life Palace is marked, and so is the Body Palace; both positions are worked out exactly this way. Xingge takes the birth date in the Western calendar and converts it to the lunar month before counting, so readers do not need to convert anything themselves. For what the Life and Body Palaces each govern, see Life Palace and Body Palace.

The three examples here expose the pattern behind the rule: each hour later, the Life Palace steps back one palace and the Body Palace steps forward one, so they move two palaces further apart each time. In the Zi hour the two overlap, in the Chou hour they are two palaces apart, in the Yin hour four.

It is clearer with palace names. First month, Chou hour: Life in Chou, Body in Mao, and Mao, the third palace counting forward from the Life Palace, is the Fortune Palace. Yin hour: Life in Zi, Body in Chen, and Chen is the Career Palace. In other words, which named palace the Body Palace falls on depends only on the birth hour, not on the month. That is the most useful consequence of 'the other palaces follow the same way' in the next segment.

「餘宮仿此」 can be turned into a table that is easy to remember. Born in the Zi or Wu hour, the Body Palace shares the Life Palace; Chou or Wei, the Body Palace is on the Fortune Palace; Yin or Shen, the Career Palace; Mao or You, the Travel Palace; Chen or Xu, the Wealth Palace; Si or Hai, the Spouse Palace. The Body Palace only ever lands on these six, never on Siblings, Children, Health, Friends, Property or Parents.

A common mistake is to treat the Body Palace as a thirteenth palace; it is really a marker laid over one of the twelve. The Quan Shu talks about the Body Palace in many places, for example the star-combinations chapter's 「身吉命凶亦為美論」 and 「命弱身強財源不聚」 (see these lines); before reading them, first find which palace the Body Palace lies on.

There is at most one leap month in a year, roughly once every three years, so most people never need this rule. The Quan Shu's solution is blunt: the whole leap month counts as the next month. Xingge's conversion is described under 'The Xingge approach' above; it only affects people born in the first half of a leap month. By the Quan Shu, the palace reached when counting the months moves one further, and the Life and Body Palaces both shift one palace forward with it.

To know whether you were born in a leap month, look at the lunar birth date on your Xingge chart: if it is marked as a leap month, you were. The Quan Shu only says that placing Life and Body uses the changed month; it does not say whether the stars placed by month, Zuo Fu, You Bi, Tian Xing and Tian Yao, change as well. The second half of the sentence, 'the Na Yin Jia Zi song must be learned by heart', announces the next step, fixing the Five Elements Bureau; the rhyme is in The Five Elements Bureau and the Sixty Na Yin.

This segment breaks fixing the bureau into three steps, none of which can be skipped. First, use the year stem to set the stem of the Yin palace (in a Jia year, Yin is Bing). Then lay the stems forward to the Life Palace and read its stem and branch. Finally, look up the Na Yin element of that pair. The Quan Shu's example has the Life Palace in Yin, so the first step already gives Bing Yin. If the Life Palace is not in Yin, keep laying out the stems. For example, born in a Geng Wu year with the Life Palace in Chou: in a Geng year, Yin starts at Wu (戊), so Wu Yin, Ji Mao and so on run all the way to Wu Zi at Zi and Ji Chou at Chou; the Na Yin of Ji Chou is thunderbolt fire, so this too is Fire 6.

The palaces that trip people up are Zi and Chou. They come after Hai, and the stems continue on from there; they are not counted backward from Yin. Every palace on a Xingge chart shows its stem and branch, and the Five Elements Bureau is shown on the chart too, so you can check your own working against them.

The Quan Shu only gives the answer here (the first day in the fire bureau is You); the method is hidden in the five bureau charts among the setup charts. The 'make-up method' often taught today reproduces those charts. Divide the birth day by the bureau number; if it does not divide evenly, add to the day until it does, and the amount added is the 'borrowed number'. Take Fire 6 and the first day: adding 5 brings it to 6, and the quotient is 1. Count the quotient from the Yin palace (1 stops at Yin itself); the borrowed number 5 is odd, so step back 5 palaces: Chou, Zi, Hai, Xu, You. Zi Wei is in You. If the borrowed number is even, step forward instead.

'A hair's breadth becomes a thousand miles' is no figure of speech: if Zi Wei is wrong, the whole set of fourteen main stars is wrong with it. Anyone unsure of their birth hour can read the Quan Shu's Getting the Birth Hour Right. For the full Fire 6 table, see the Fire 6 chart for placing Zi Wei.

The twelve palaces are laid out counterclockwise from the Life Palace: Life, Siblings, Spouse and on to Parents, so the Parents Palace lands on the neighbour of the Life Palace in the forward direction. Xingge's square chart runs the same way: the forward neighbour of the Life Palace is the Parents Palace and the backward neighbour is the Siblings Palace. Which way the Decade Luck starts and how flanking palaces are read later on are all based on this orientation.

On the names: the Quan Shu's 「妻妾」 is the Spouse Palace and 「奴僕」 is Xingge's Friends Palace. Elsewhere the Quan Shu also calls the Parents Palace 'Appearance'; the Zi Wei question, for instance, says Zi Wei 「落疾厄、兄弟、奴僕、相貌、四陷宮」 (see the original). When you meet the 'Appearance Palace', it means the Parents Palace.