Clash, harmony, harm and punishment: what the branches do to each other

The twelve earthly branches are a counting cycle, older than their zodiac animals and used for a great many things: years, months, the twelve double hours of a day, compass directions. The animals were attached later as a mnemonic and they are how most people meet the cycle, so both names appear in the tables below.

Every relation on this page is a distance on that ring. Six places apart is a clash. Four places apart is a trine. The harmonies and harms are two more fixed tables that are not about distance but that are just as closed. Nothing on the list requires interpretation to determine. You look up the pair.

The cleanest relation in the system, and the one that does the most work in a real reading. Six pairs, each sitting at opposite points of the ring, which is the whole rule.

The character is 冲, which means to rush at, to charge, to flush out. English translations reach for conflict and that is a shade too moral. The classical reading is disturbance: things that were sitting still start moving, arrangements come apart and get remade, decisions that were being deferred are forced into the open. Moves, job changes and travel are the standard associations, and none of them is inherently bad.

Which pillar takes the clash changes the reading more than the fact of the clash does. The year pillar is read as the outer world and the family you were born into, the month pillar as career and the parental generation, the day branch as the marriage and the self, the hour as children and the later years. A year clashing the day branch and a year clashing the year branch are not the same event, and any reading that reports only that there is a clash has thrown away most of the information.

合 means to close, to join, to fit together, and the standard English rendering as harmony is the most misleading word on this page. A combination is a pull. Two branches in a combination are attached to each other, and attachment costs attention.

So classical practice does not treat combinations as automatically good. A branch that is bound up with another is described as occupied, and a chart whose useful branch is combined away is a recognized problem with its own name. The one-line version practitioners use is that a combination is as often a distraction as a help, which is also how our methodology page describes it, and it is worth carrying that caveat into any reading that reports one cheerfully.

Take every third branch around the ring and you get four groups of three, and each group pools into one of the five elements. This is the relation that does the heaviest lifting in the tradition, because a complete trine in a chart genuinely changes what the chart is made of rather than merely labeling a year.

Each trio runs a beginning, a peak and a resting place of one element, which is why the three sit evenly spaced: the element is born at one, at its strongest at the next, and stored at the third. The two right-hand columns are explained below.

The same four groups are what the zodiac compatibility tradition calls the best matches between two people. That application, and the honest arithmetic of how many of the sixty-six possible pairings actually carry a mark, has its own page. Here the trine matters because of what it does inside one chart.

The harms have a derivation the clashes do not: each pair is what you get when you take one branch and ask which branch clashes with its harmony partner. Interfere with somebody's alliance and you have a harm. The Sanming Tonghui says as much when it explains that the harms arise out of the harmonies.

What the tradition describes is slow friction rather than collision: obstruction, being undermined, plans that take longer than they should and nobody quite able to say why. It is the quietest relation on the page, the classical literature says much less about it than the modern internet does, and it deserves to be read as the footnote it is.

The strangest of the four, and the one where the classical reasoning is most worth reading, because the names are not descriptions of what happens to you. They are descriptions of what is wrong with the relation.

The line in that chapter worth carrying away is structural: the three punishments arise out of the combinations, in the same way the six harms arise out of the six harmonies. None of these tables is a separate list of grievances. They are all consequences of the same ring, which is the strongest argument the tradition makes for taking any of them seriously.

One honest note about our own calculator. The tables on this page overlap. 3 of the pairs printed above sit in more than one of them, and because our engine reports only the strongest relation it finds, in the order clash, then punishment, then harm, then combination, a reading will name one and stay silent about the other.

• Tiger and Monkey is printed here as a punishment; a reading will report it as a clash.
• Ox and Goat is printed here as a punishment; a reading will report it as a clash.
• Tiger and Snake is printed here as a harm; a reading will report it as a punishment.

That is a deliberate simplification for legibility, not a claim that the quieter relation is absent. A practitioner reading by hand would see both.

Classical practice carries dozens of named stars, the shen sha, most of which are mechanical lookups that later commentators have picked over for centuries. Our calculator marks two of them, because they are the two whose placement rule is unambiguous across schools and whose readings are specific enough to be worth printing.

Peach blossom, xian chi, marks charm and the attention of others. Travel horse, yi ma, marks movement, relocation and journeys. Both are anchored to your day branch: find which trine your day branch belongs to in the table above, and the two right-hand columns give you the branch that carries each star for you. A year arriving on that branch is a peach blossom year or a travel horse year.

Peach blossom in particular is read as double-edged and not as good news, and the traditional commentary is blunt about why: the quality that draws people is the same one that complicates arrangements. English pages that render it as romance luck have taken half the meaning.

Neither star, and none of the four relations above, moves the score our calculator prints. They label a year; the score comes from the five-element balance alone. The methodology page states that in full, along with the precedence order and why the earlier version of our chart stopped drawing them as a visual.

They are not verdicts, and a reading built out of them alone is doing the thing this site exists to argue against. A relation says two branches stand in a named position to each other. It does not say what happens, to whom, or whether it is welcome.

They are also not the main event. The weight of a bazi reading sits in the five-element balance between the eight characters and in which of them stands for you. Branch relations are the second layer, and the schools that weight them most heavily are not the schools whose method we publish. Ours is written out in full, and it is one school's, which is a sentence we would rather write than have someone discover.