These groups in your chart
Add birth details, or explore the example, to see present and missing members in each group.
Open the group explorer →Four directional-seasonal groups
The seasonal-meeting table used here is Yin–Mao–Chen (寅–卯–辰), Eastern Wood and spring; Si–Wu–Wei (巳–午–未), Southern Fire and summer; Shen–You–Xu (申–酉–戌), Western Metal and autumn; and Hai–Zi–Chou (亥–子–丑), Northern Water and winter. Joey Yap’s directional-combination teaching table prints these four three-meeting sets.
The Book of Rites’ Monthly Ordinances supplies older seasonal correlative material that links months with directional and phase language. It does not by itself settle the date or author of every later BaZi table. ‘Seasonal meeting’ therefore names the conventional table used by this tool rather than claiming a single, timelessly uniform lineage.
Joey Yap, BaZi for Smart Money Workshop ↗Book of Rites 禮記, ‘Monthly Ordinances’ 月令 ↗
What the season and direction labels mean
In this inherited correspondence scheme, Yin–Mao–Chen is placed with eastern Wood and spring, Si–Wu–Wei with southern Fire and summer, Shen–You–Xu with western Metal and autumn, and Hai–Zi–Chou with northern Water and winter. The labels organize time, direction and five-phase associations; they do not describe modern meteorology at a birthplace or a literal material inside a chart.
The seasonal language helps distinguish these groups from three harmonies. A seasonal meeting gathers three consecutive branch positions in the cited directional-seasonal table, whereas a three harmony uses a different four-triplet table and its own lifecycle rationale. A chart may be checked against both tables without one result cancelling the other.
Book of Rites 禮記, ‘Monthly Ordinances’ 月令 ↗Joey Yap, BaZi for Smart Money Workshop ↗
What the native tool calculates
The tool first calculates the chart’s year, month, day and hour pillars under its stated calendar and clock conventions. It then compares the four visible Earthly Branch occurrences with each exact seasonal-meeting triplet. For every group it displays the branches present, branches missing, and every pillar occurrence of each present member.
A group completes only when all three distinct listed branches occur. The chart’s visual ordering does not require the members to be adjacent, and a duplicate branch does not fill an absent member. The calculation reports membership; it does not calculate seasonal strength, phase quantity, transformation, timing, or precedence among patterns.
Two members are incomplete, not a partial transformation
If Yin and Mao occur but Chen does not, the tool reports Yin and Mao as present and Chen as missing from the Yin–Mao–Chen seasonal meeting. It does not label the result a ‘half transformation’ or infer that Wood has been created, strengthened, or made decisive.
This restraint keeps the tool’s result auditable. Terms such as half meetings, transformation conditions, favorable phases and seasonal strength belong to additional school-specific methods with their own inputs and source rules. They cannot be obtained merely by counting two of the three branches in this membership table.
Worked example: a complete autumnal Metal meeting
Suppose a calculated chart has Shen in year, You in month, Mao in day, and Xu in hour. The tool reports Shen–You–Xu as a complete seasonal meeting, with the group’s exact occurrences at year, month and hour. It identifies Mao at day as outside that particular group.
Under the cited table, Shen–You–Xu carries Western Metal and autumn correspondence. That is a sourced traditional label beside the computed membership result. It does not mean that Metal has transformed the chart, that Mao has been defeated, or that any event will occur.
Joey Yap, BaZi for Smart Money Workshop ↗Book of Rites 禮記, ‘Monthly Ordinances’ 月令 ↗
Keep calculation, tradition and reflection separate
Seasonal-meeting names are part of a traditional correlative vocabulary. They can inform study of how a lineage organizes branches, directions, seasons and five phases. They do not supply evidence about temperament, compatibility, health, or a fixed future. Any fuller reading needs a named school and disclosed rules beyond this detector.
Original Astral Atlas reflection: once the tool has shown the three member locations, ask, ‘What does this seasonal image invite me to notice about the way I am reading the chart?’ Keep the answer as a personal response, and retain the calendar convention and exact calculated branches so the membership result can be checked later.
Book of Rites 禮記, ‘Monthly Ordinances’ 月令 ↗Joey Yap, BaZi for Smart Money Workshop ↗
Historical wording and the convention used here
The Wuxing Dayi (五行大義) discusses both directional triples and phase-based three-branch relations. Its lifecycle sequence uses birth (生), flourishing (王) and burial (葬); later presentations may use flourishing (旺) and storage (庫). Burial is not the separate lifecycle position called death (死).
The opening of Ziping Zhenquan’s chapter on clashes and combinations calls Shen–Zi–Chen-type sets 三會. Modern practitioner tables often reserve Sanhui for consecutive seasonal triples. This entry states the modern distinction explicitly rather than assuming one label had an unchanged meaning across every text.
Yuanhai Ziping also lists an Earth arrangement of four branches, Chen–Xu–Chou–Wei. The present inspector covers four triples per family; that Earth arrangement requires a separate rule. No single inventor or original date is established by these passages.
Word origin · etymology
Chinese sānhuì 三會: sān means ‘three’; huì means ‘meet, assemble, converge.’
‘Seasonal meetings’ specifies the directional and seasonal use of the label in this entry. 三會/三会 are traditional and simplified written forms; romanization renders the modern Mandarin reading and does not establish one historical pronunciation.
How we know · epistemology
Traditional seasonal-directional correspondences and calendar-derived membership calculation
The native tool reports a complete listed group only when its three different branches appear in the four calculated pillars. Its four phase/season labels follow a traditional correlative table; they are not measured energy, proof that a group has ‘transformed,’ or a prediction. The origin and exact status of ‘three meetings’ as a single standardized BaZi term varies across later teaching lineages, so this entry does not assign it a single author or date.
Book of Rites 禮記, ‘Monthly Ordinances’ 月令 ↗Joey Yap, BaZi for Smart Money Workshop ↗五行大義 卷二 第六論五行相雜・三論方位雜 ↗
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