XinggeFixing a Child's Birth Hour
〈定小兒生時訣〉
The Complete Book of Zi Wei Dou Shu, Volume 3: Reading a life and its luck periods · Original text with translation
Introduction
Fixing a Child's Birth Hour (定小兒生時訣), in volume three of the Complete Book of Zi Wei Dou Shu, consists of two rhymes that teach how to find clues on the baby itself when the hour of birth is uncertain.
The first looks at the hair whorl on the crown: a child born in the Zi, Wu, Mao or You hour has a single whorl, or one slightly to the left; one born in the Yin, Shen, Si or Hai hour also has a single whorl, but to the right; one born in the Chen, Xu, Chou or Wei hour has a double whorl. The second looks at the posture at birth: born in Zi, Wu, Mao or You, face up; in Yin, Shen, Si or Hai, on its side; in Chen, Xu, Chou or Wei, face down.
These rhymes can only narrow the hour down to one of three groups of four; they cannot fix a single hour. They are rules of thumb from experience.
1子午卯酉單頂門，或偏左邊二三分，寅申巳亥亦單頂，偏居右去始為真，辰戌丑未是雙頂，胞胎受定正時辰。
TranslationBorn in the Zi, Wu, Mao or You hour: a single whorl on the crown, or one two or three tenths to the left. Born in the Yin, Shen, Si or Hai hour: also a single whorl, and only if it lies to the right is it true. Born in the Chen, Xu, Chou or Wei hour: a double whorl. The true hour is fixed in the womb.
- 頂門
- The crown of the head; here, the hair whorl.
- 胞胎
- The womb, pregnancy.
This rhyme corrects the birth hour from the hair whorl on a baby's crown. It sorts the twelve hours by branch into three groups, Zi Wu Mao You, Yin Shen Si Hai and Chen Xu Chou Wei, which are exactly the four cardinal, four 'birth' and four 'tomb' branches. Without accurate timekeeping, the hour was often disputed in the old days, so methods of working back from the body grew up. This is folk lore with no verifiable basis; today a hospital record of the birth time takes precedence. The next two chapters of the Quan Shu are both about why the hour must be right; see Getting the Birth Hour Right.
2又
TranslationAnother:
「又」 just marks that another rhyme follows. It uses the same three groups of branches as the first, only switching the clue from the hair whorl to the baby's posture at birth. Putting the two together shows how much the ancients cared about correcting the hour, and that there was more than one folk method.
3子午卯酉面向天，寅申巳亥側身眠，辰戌丑未臉伏地，臨盆當試用心堅。
TranslationBorn in Zi, Wu, Mao or You, the face looks up to heaven; born in Yin, Shen, Si or Hai, it lies on its side; born in Chen, Xu, Chou or Wei, the face lies down to the ground. At the delivery, test this with careful attention.
- 臨盆
- Giving birth.
The second rhyme reads the hour from the baby's posture at delivery: face up for the cardinal hours, on its side for the 'birth' hours, face down for the 'tomb' hours. Modern medicine knows that the presentation at birth depends on labour and the baby's position, not on the hour, so this rhyme can only be taken as a piece of cultural history about how the ancients checked the time. If you are unsure of your own hour, a more practical approach is to cast the charts for the two neighbouring hours and compare the character described by each Life Palace's main star, and your experience over the last ten years against each Decade Luck, to see which fits better.
Base text (Wikisource, partly in simplified Chinese)
FAQ
What if you don't know your birth hour? Does the Quan Shu have a method?
Fixing a Child's Birth Hour uses two clues: the hair whorl on the crown (single and to the left for Zi, Wu, Mao and You; single and to the right for Yin, Shen, Si and Hai; double for Chen, Xu, Chou and Wei) and the posture at birth (face up for Zi, Wu, Mao and You; on the side for Yin, Shen, Si and Hai; face down for Chen, Xu, Chou and Wei). Together they narrow the hour to a group of four.
Which hour of birth goes with a double hair whorl?
According to Fixing a Child's Birth Hour, a child born in the Chen, Xu, Chou or Wei hour has 「雙頂」, a double crown, that is, two hair whorls.