XinggeGetting the Birth Hour Right
〈論人生時要審的確〉
The Complete Book of Zi Wei Dou Shu, Volume 3: Reading a life and its luck periods · Original text with translation
Introduction
Getting the Birth Hour Right (論人生時要審的確), in volume three of the Complete Book of Zi Wei Dou Shu, is one paragraph reminding the reader to be sure of the birth hour before casting a chart.
The Quan Shu says the Zi and Hai hours are the hardest to fix: the Zi hour has ten ke, the first half of which belongs to the previous night's Hai hour and only the second half to the present day's Zi hour; on overcast or rainy days, with no shadow to read, a luo jing must be used to find the true time, and if it is wrong, the chart will not be accurate.
Xingge handles the Zi hour differently from this; see the note on that segment. The base text's 推祥 is an error for 推詳, 'to work out in detail'.
1如人生子亥二時最難定，準要仔細推祥，如子時有十刻，上午刻屬昨夜亥時，下午刻屬今日子時，如天氣陰雨之際，必須羅經以定真確時候，若差訛則命不準矣。
TranslationThe Zi and Hai hours are the hardest to fix for a person's birth, and must be worked out carefully in detail. For example, the Zi hour has ten ke: the first ke belong to the previous night's Hai hour, and the later ke to the present day's Zi hour. In overcast or rainy weather, a luo jing must be used to fix the true time; if there is any error, the chart will not be accurate.
- 刻
- Ke: an old unit of time, one hundred to a day and night.
- 羅經
- Luo jing, a geomantic compass; here, an instrument used to fix the time.
- 差訛
- An error.
Textual note: The 推祥 in 「準要仔細推祥」 should be 推詳, 'to work out in detail'.
The Xingge approachXingge divides the Zi hour into an early and a late Zi hour: 0 to 1 am counts as the Zi hour of the same day, and the late Zi hour, 11 pm to midnight, counts as the Zi hour of the following day. The Quan Shu here says the first half of the Zi hour belongs to the previous night's Hai hour and the second half to the present day's Zi hour; the two are not the same.
The point is that the Zi and Hai hours are the hardest to fix, because they sit on the boundary between days: a ke out and the day changes, so the day pillar and the birth date both differ, and with them the positions of the Life Palace and Zi Wei. The Quan Shu's split puts the first half of Zi with the previous night's Hai hour and the second half with the present day's Zi hour, which is not how Xingge divides early and late Zi (see 'The Xingge approach' above). In practice, anyone born between 11 pm and 1 am does best to cast both versions and compare. 「羅經」 is literally a compass, used here to mean measuring the time with an instrument; today the time on a birth certificate is the best record, but check whether daylight saving time was in force that year, which would make the clock time an hour ahead of the true time.
Base text (Wikisource, partly in simplified Chinese)
FAQ
Which day does a Zi-hour birth count as?
This chapter of the Quan Shu says the first half of the Zi hour belongs to the previous night's Hai hour and the second half to the present day's Zi hour. Xingge counts the late Zi hour (11 pm to midnight) as the Zi hour of the following day, which differs from the Quan Shu.
Why are the Zi and Hai hours the hardest to fix?
Because those two hours straddle two days and fall at night, when the ancients had no clocks and, on rainy days, could not see the sky. The Quan Shu says the time must be fixed with a luo jing, or else 「命不準矣」, the chart will not be accurate.