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 South Korea, Japan and Vietnam.
Four Pillars of Destiny can be dated back to the Han Dynasty, but it was not systematic as it is known today.
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).
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. Representatives of this school and their publications include:
Shō-Kan is also the relative pronoun among the Heavenly Stems. A birthday in the Chinese calendar will be written甲子, 甲戌, 甲申, 甲午, 甲辰, 甲寅, whereas the will belong to the Shō-Kan. When the Heavenly Stems will be 甲 in a birthday for the Chinese calendar, the 丁 acts as a Shō-Kan factor, as follows:
The chart is as follows:
The main structure of his chart is 傷官 (Shō-Kan), 格.
The day of 丁 (in the Chinese calendar) meets April, the month of, the month of 戊, so that we get the Shō-Kan. The most important element and worker in his chart is the 甲 or 乙. The Inju is also the worker which controls Shō-Kan. In 1945, in the year of 乙酉, the Inju has no effect. The Heavenly Stem 乙 is in . Additionally, the Dai Un (Japan's own long-term history) is as follows. The beginning of April in the Lunar calendar is the fifth day, so there are 24 days from day 5 to Hirohito's birthday. One month is equivalent to ten years in Dai Un, and the 24 days are equivalent to eight years. Events in the historical timeline corresponding to his life from age eight to 18 are as follows.
From the age of 8 to the age of 18 : 辛卯
Advocates of the Shō-Kan system believe that Hirohito's chart somehow explains the defeat of Japan in World War II after the catastrophic atomic bomb explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The problem of periodicity of four pillars is a problem in calendrical arithmetics, but most of fortune tellers are unable to handle the mathematics correctly. Hee[2] for example, proposed that it takes 240 years for a given four-pillar quadruplet to repeat itself. In p. 22, Hee wrote,
... because of the numerous possible combinations, it takes 60 years for the same set of year pillars to repeat itself (by comparison, as set of month pillars repeats itself after just five years). Therefore, if you have a certain day and time, the set of four pillars will repeat itself in 60 years. However, since the same day may not appear in exactly the same month – and even if it is in the same month, the day may not be found in the same half month – it takes 240 years before the identical four pillars appear again ...Hee's proposal is incorrect and can be easily refuted by a counterexample. For example, the four-pillar quadruplets for 1984-3-18 and 2044-3-3 are exactly the same (i.e. 甲子-丁卯-辛亥-xx) and they are spaced only by 60 years. But the next iso-quadruplet will reappear only after 360 years (on 2404-4-5). Furthermore, a periodicity of 1800 years is needed to order to match both sexagenary cycle and the Gregorian cycle. For example, 4-3-18, 1980-3-18, and 3964-3-18 share the same four-pillar quadruplet.
The solution to the iso-Gregorian quadruplet is a Diophantine problem. Suppose that the gap,
g
g=60(365λ1+λ2)
f
f+g'
g'
g'=365λ3+366λ4.
g
g'
60(365λ1+λ2)=365λ3+366λ4,
to which one of the solution is
(λ1,λ2,λ3,λ4)=(33,8,1575,402).
g=60(365 x 33+8)=723180