Da Liu Ren Chart Calculator
Da Liu Ren is one of the three canonical systems, alongside Qi Men Dun Jia and Tai Yi, and the one with the largest surviving literature. It turns a moment in time into a pair of stacked plates, then draws four lessons and three transmissions from them. This page follows the casting order.
The plates: month general on the hour
The first step is to rotate the heaven plate. The twelve branches of the earth plate never move. The heaven plate is turned by placing the month general on the branch of the hour of consultation, with the remaining eleven branches following in order. The resulting offset between the two plates determines everything taken afterwards.
The month general is not the month. It is the station of the sun, and it changes at the major solar terms rather than the minor ones. This is a different boundary from the one BaZi uses for its month pillar, and confusing the two is the most common early error.
Taking the four lessons
The four lessons come from the stem and the branch of the day. The first takes the heaven-plate branch sitting above the lodging position of the day stem; the second takes what sits above that; the third starts from the day branch; the fourth takes what sits above the third. The lessons pair up, the first two standing for the querent and the last two for the other party.
A stem has no position of its own on the earth plate, so it borrows one. This set of lodging positions is a precondition for taking the lessons — get it wrong and all four lessons are wrong.
The three transmissions
The transmissions are what the system is known for. Initial, middle and final arrange a matter into a line: where it comes from, where it currently rests, and where it ends up.
There are nine ways the transmissions can be derived, and the order of testing is fixed. You check for the first condition, and only if it does not apply do you move to the next, continuing until one of the nine applies. The order cannot be skipped; skipping it yields a different set of transmissions.
The twelve generals, day and night
Twelve generals attach to the heaven plate and represent the human dimension of a matter — who is involved and in what manner. They are laid out from the Noble One, and once its position is fixed the other eleven follow forward or backward from it.
The Noble One has a daytime and a nighttime placement, selected by whether the hour of consultation falls in the day or night half, and derived from the stem of the day. The same moment yields a different arrangement of all twelve depending on which applies, so hours near the boundary deserve a second check.
Lesson types and shensha
Once the lessons and transmissions are set, the cast falls into a named type. The tradition catalogues seven hundred and twenty of them, each corresponding to a characteristic situation, and much of the classical literature is devoted to deciding which type a cast belongs to and how the exceptions are handled.
Shensha are a qualifying layer rather than the trunk: they colour a cast that is already formed and do not alter the transmissions. Working through the mechanical casting first and only then moving to types and shensha is the traditional reading order — starting from the verdicts makes the worked examples in the books impossible to reproduce.
How to use it
- Enter the time of consultation; the month general is derived from the solar term and the heaven plate is rotated
- Take the four lessons from the day stem and branch, then derive the three transmissions in the fixed order
- Place the twelve generals and shensha, and identify the lesson type