How palaces are scored: the Life Palace, its four directions, Mind and Body

Two people can both have Zi Wei + Po Jun in the Life Palace: one keeps tearing things down for life, the other is good at cleaning up afterwards. The difference is often not in the Life Palace but in the palaces around it. This page explains how palaces enter the score and why each weight is set as it is.

Layer one: the Life Palace and its four directions

Zi Wei never reads the Life Palace alone. The Life Palace is “me”; the opposite Travel Palace is how I appear outside and what I meet there; the Wealth Palace is how I handle resources and value; the Career Palace is how I work. Together they are the Life Palace’s four directions, and the old texts always read them together.

The sixty star groups’ closest types come from this layer. Because Zi Wei’s placement rules are fixed, a given star group has the same stars in its four directions whichever branch it sits in, so its star-group score is the same too.

No major star in the Life Palace: borrowing

When the Life Palace holds none of the fourteen major stars, the old texts call it a palace “without a main star”. The San He convention is to read the Travel Palace’s stars as if they were in the Life Palace, but weaker; we count them at 80% and do not count the Travel Palace a second time. About 16.4% of the 16,802 sample charts have an empty Life Palace. People with an empty Life Palace are often described as adaptable and shaped by their surroundings; in MBTI terms, their axis scores tend to sit closer to the middle.

Layer two: the Mind Palace moves only two axes

The Mind Palace governs inner life, thinking, values and what a person truly cares about. That is closest to MBTI’s “how you understand the world” (N/S) and “what standard you decide by” (T/F), so we let the Mind Palace touch only those two axes, at a quarter. Visible habits such as outgoing or reserved, planned or spontaneous are left out of it.

The Mind Palace sits in a fixed position relative to the Life Palace, so for a given star group in a given branch its stars are fixed too. Every star-group page lists the Mind Palace stars for both branches and the type after adding them.

Layer two: the Body Palace is acquired habit

The Body Palace stands for the character built up after birth; the old texts say its influence grows from around age thirty. It can only fall in the Life, Spouse, Wealth, Travel, Career or Mind palace, set by birth month and hour. When it shares the Life Palace, inborn and acquired agree and we add nothing; otherwise the stars of that palace count a quarter on all four axes.

This is a layer Zi Wei has and MBTI does not: it accepts that a person in their twenties and in their forties can differ, and it shows in advance which way the change is likely to go.

How often palaces move people off their star-group type

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; each chart includes the palace and pattern layers. This is how the classical descriptions spread across the four axes, not the MBTI distribution of real people.

For about three people in four, the Life Palace star group alone decides the type; the rest have at least one letter rewritten by palaces or patterns. T/F is rewritten most often, because the Mind Palace feeds it directly and many star groups sit close to the middle on it.

Jung’s cognitive functions (an analogy only)

Behind MBTI sits Jung’s order of cognitive functions: each type has a dominant function, an auxiliary, and less practised ones after that. People sometimes ask whether the Life Palace is the dominant function and the Mind Palace the auxiliary. The analogy has something to it: the Life Palace is the most visible side, the Mind Palace the deeper drive. But the two theories are built differently, and Zi Wei has no idea of eight functions in a fixed order, so we use it only as a teaching image, not in the scores.

What this first version leaves out

The four transformations, the six lucky and six unlucky stars, and the decade and yearly periods are not counted. Transformations and unlucky stars can change how a star shows up a great deal; a Hua Ji often makes a trait stubborn and knotted, and a decade period can clearly pull someone toward the other side for ten years. They matter, but adding them would make the reasoning too hard to follow, so this version uses only major stars, palaces and main-star patterns.