Ji clash and Ji chains

Of the four transformations, the Flying Star school watches Ji most closely. Lu, Quan and Ke describe how things go smoothly; Ji describes what you cannot put down and have to deal with, and that is often where the cause of an event hides. This page covers three uses of Ji: where it lands, what it clashes, and the chain you get by following it.

Landing and clashing

An easy way to remember it: the landing palace is where a matter gets stored; the clashed palace is where it bursts out. Opposite palaces in Zi Wei are two sides of one coin (Life and Travel, Siblings and Friends, Spouse and Career, Children and Property, Wealth and Mind, Health and Parents), so every Ji line really touches two palaces.

Birth-year Ji and palace Ji

The birth-year Ji is something you are born with, often read as an inborn lesson. A palace-stem Ji is the care a palace generates as it goes about its business. When the two coincide it is worth a closer look: in about 10.1% of charts, the star the Life Palace stem turns into Ji is the same star as the birth-year Ji, as if the same matter were flagged twice.

Following the Ji

A Ji chain is simple to build. Start from a palace, see where its Ji lands, then take the landing palace’s stem and fly its Ji, and keep going until you return to a palace you have already visited. The chain reads as how one concern leads into the next.

Example chart: a woman born on 15 June 1988 at 10:00 (a made-up birthday), Wu-Chen year, Si hour, Metal-4 bureau, with the Life Palace in Yi-Chou holding Tai Yang and Tai Yin. Starting from the Spouse Palace:

The Spouse Palace stem Gui turns Tan Lang into Ji, which sits in the Parents Palace; the Parents stem Jia turns Tai Yang into Ji, which sits in the Life Palace; the Life stem Yi turns Tai Yin into Ji, which sits in the Life Palace itself (a self-transformed Ji), so the chain stops: Spouse → Parents → Life → Life. One reading: what you care about in love spills into how you deal with elders and bosses, then comes back to rest on you, and your habit is to care until the very end and then let go. A chain gives you a storyline, not a verdict; start from a different palace and you get a different story.

What 16,802 charts show

How we counted: our engine cast one Zi Wei chart for every day from 1960 to 2005, with the birth hour drawn by a fixed-seed random sample and sexes alternating, 16,802 charts in all. Palace stems, flights and self-transformations come from this site's engine, which we checked chart by chart against the open-source iztro library.

Twelve palaces each fly one Ji, twelve lines in all, so on average every palace is clashed exactly once; that is built into the structure. The twelve Ji lines land in only 7.47 different palaces on average, so some palaces are always hit by several at once, and Flying Star readers treat those as the chart’s busy areas. Since 62.2% of charts have a Ji clashing the Life Palace, “a clash on the Life Palace means a hard life” does not hold up.