Most people know that BaZi can be used to determined when someone’s pratner will appear, but enthusiasts often don’t go beyond that and talk about how BaZi can be used to assess the dynamics within the marriage and the xiang (像) it takes.
I’ve wrote about marriage and relationship many times. Here are some blog posts that you can refer to:
- Why Your Marriage, Wealth and Success Are Interconnected
- Spouses Who Bring Good Luck – A Chinese Metaphysics Perspective
I won’t go into anything philosophical here because my older blog posts have already addressed this. This post is only going to focus on the technicals.
Everyone should know me well enough by now to know I don’t sugar-coat. Some people just shouldn’t get married. Do not ever approach Chinese metaphysics and see it as a tool to simply let you know when your partner will appear. For some, they’ll never appear. A chart can tell us a lot more, and what a chart can tell you sometimes is not going to be pleasant.
Assessing the marriage of a chart-holder is not complicated, but to get the details right is the difficult part. Then again, this applies to analyzing any aspect of life. Fo marriage, it generally it boils down to three things:
- Assessing the role of the element representing the spouse. Is it what the chart needs?
- Looking at the Day Branch and its role within the natal chart.
- The part that usually throws beginners or enthusiasts off is interpreting how other parts of the chart impact the above two factors mentioned.
Now, you only know where to look. How to look at it is the real challenge here.
Some People Are Born To Be Bad Partners
The above chart is an Yin Wood male chart-holder and would be regarded as a strong Daymaster chart.
BaZi beginners would immediately jump to a few conclusions when they first lay eyes on the above chart:
- The above is a high-quality chart because it is a strong Daymaster chart with wealth elements appearing and that the chart-holder is wealthy.
- The beneficial element is Earth – which is categorically incorrect. This is not to say that the Earth element isn’t important because it is. Strong Yin Wood needs Earth to root itself into to continue growing. However, an element being important doesn’t mean it holds the title of being the beneficial element (用神)。
I’ve met a lot of students who took classes from other ‘practitioners’ before. All of them come out of those lessons with the habit of assuming that as long as a Daymaster is strong, the beneficial elements are whatever that opposes or drains the Daymaster. In other words, strong Daymasters will have three beneficial elements. That’s absolute garbage.
I wish to remind everyone that strong Daymaster charts aren’t that lucky to have three beneficial elements. Strong Daymaster charts aren’t special. The word “strong” Daymaster is simply a way of describing the state of a chart.
To call the above a high-quality chart would be a far cry from what a high-quality chart should really look like.
An experienced practitioner can immediately tell the above is a chart-holder who isn’t going to be a good husband:
- The number one reason is that the Earth element, which is the spouse element, comes under harm. Living with this person is going to be extremely pressurizing. People with such charts are not able to uplift the quality of their partner’s life. There’s definitely going to be something wrong with the dynamics.
- The other reason, which is a less severe reason, is that this chart has 华盖 (Hua Gai). Interestingly, but not surprisingly, Hua Gai appears in both this person’s BaZi and Zi Wei Dou Shu charts. This auxiliary star appearing in the Branch 丑 (chou) in the BaZi chart, and using Zi Wei Dou Shu, the chart-holder’s Life Palace (命宫) also lies in 丑 and you will see a Hua Gai in there.
- The star Hua Gai has its pros and cons. Although they can be extremely intelligent, with some even having an artistic flair, they often struggle in the romance and social department. Because of this, a lot of chart-holder’s with Hua Gai work better alone and are not suited for positions of leadership. They can be a thought-leader of course in their specific field of study, but not a leader of a group of people. If you know of a politician who has had an excellent academic history, but you find that they fail to inspire, that’s how Hua Gai can come across.
The fact that chart-holder is no doubt an extremely intelligent person who holds two masters degrees, but if we were to assess marriage and overall progress, being born under Hua Gai and his Spouse Element being harmed already sends red flags. To be fair to this male chart-holder, such a chart was never meant to be able to find a good partner in the first place. As I mentioned time and again, people will almost always end up with a person whose chart paints the same story.
Looking At Precise Year The Marriage Breaks Down
The above chart-holder was said to have caught his wife cheating on him on 2019 (己亥 ji-hai), but the marriage actually already started breaking down in 2018 (戊戌 wu-xu).
Although the Spouse Element of Yang Wood (戊土) appears in 2018, it appearing is actually not a good sign. You might be wondering if the act of cheating in 2019 can be seen in the charts. It can.
Most people would assume that the cheating happened because of the seasonal Water combination 亥子丑三会水局 that forms from the 10-year Elemental Phases and Annual Phase. It has something to do with that, but we should not assume that just because cheating happens just because the Day Branch is being interacted with. Here are some thought experiments for you:
- What if this was another chart where the Day Branch is still being interacted with a seasonal combination (三会局) with but it was of another element? Does it make a difference?
- The other 11 possible charts on the given day will still encounter the Water combination 亥子丑三会水局 due to the 10-year phases and annual phases. Does that mean everyone male chart-holder born during this day will have their wive’s cheat on them?
If you’re able to arrive at the right answer above yourself, I’d say you have some quite a bit of talent and affinity with Chinese metaphysics. If not, I’ll say what I say to every student: If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to end up harming someone. Keep the learning journey to yourself and use it for your own enrichment.
