The Seven Branch Relations in BaZi: A Full Guide

A BaZi chart is like a village of seven or eight people. When these “residents” (the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches) come together, they form alliances, collide head-on, tangle, quietly wound one another, and even call to each other from afar. BaZi sorts these interactions into seven relations: Punishment, Clash, Break, Harm, Combination, Meeting, and Arch. Understand them, and you hold the key to reading the “plot” of any chart.

First, the stage. A chart has Four Pillars (Year, Month, Day, Hour), your fixed household; the Luck Pillar is a neighbor who moves in for ten years at a time; the Annual Pillar is a guest who visits for a year. Every one of these relations is simply what happens when these characters meet. The seven guides below take them one at a time, from the plainest to the subtlest.

Start with your own chart

These relations sit in your Four Pillars and shift with your Luck Pillars and years. Enter your birth date (solar or lunar) and get your chart free in 30 seconds to see which of the seven you carry.

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The Seven Branch Relations

Combination Combination (attraction, alliance, binding) Meeting Directional Meeting (same-direction qi gathering) Clash the six Branch clashes (head-on collision) Punishment Punishment (tangling, attrition) Break Break (small damage, flawed success) Harm Harm (also called piercing) Arch Arch (empty-spirit distant combination, something from nothing)

All 35 Combinations, One by One