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Concept
Four Pillars of Destiny
Summary
The Four Pillars of Destiny, as known as "Ba-Zi", which means "eight characters" or "eight words" in Chinese, is a Chinese astrological concept that a person's destiny or fate can be divined by the two sexagenary cycle characters assigned to their birth year, month, day, and hour. This type of cosmological astrology is also widely used in both South Korea and Japan.
Four Pillars of Destiny can be dated back to the Han Dynasty, but it was not systematic as it is known today.
In the time of Tang dynasty, Lǐ Xūzhōng (Chinese: 李虛中) reorganized this concept, and used each of the two sexagenary cycle characters assigned to a person's birth year, month and date to predict one's personality and future. This was called the "Three Pillars of Destiny", and after this theory become more and more popular.
During Song Dynasty, Xú Zi Píng (Chinese:徐子平) reformed Lǐ Xūzhōng's "Three Pillars of Destiny" by adding the "birth time" as the fourth pillar. This meant adding another 2 sexagenary cycle characters to the person's fate pillars, from six characters into eight characters, which made the forecast accuracy seem much higher and making the Three Pillars of Destiny more useful. Therefore, people regarded Xú Zi Píng as the creator of a solid foundation for the Four Pillars of Destiny.
Days, hours, months, and years are all assigned one of the ten Celestial Stems (Chinese: 十天干) and one of the twelve Terrestrial Branches (Chinese: 十二地支) in the sexagenary cycle. A person's fortune is determined by looking up the branch and stem characters for each of these four parts of their birth time, with relation to the 10-year luck cycle (Chinese: 十年大运).
Sexagenary years
Sexagenary months
Sexagenary days
Sexagenary hours
The schools are the Scholarly School (學院派, Xué Yuàn Pài) and the Professional School (江湖派, Jiāng Hú Pài).
The Scholarly School began with Xú Zi Píng (徐子平) at the beginning of the Song Dynasty. Xú founded the pure theoretical basis of the system.
Official source
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