Luck pillars — astrology wiki

Also called Luck pillar · Luck cycles · Luck cycle · Major luck cycles · Great luck cycles · Dàyùn 大運 · Dayun · 大運

In BaZi, the cycles of ten years that follow the four pillars of birth. Each is named by a stem and a branch taken in order from the month pillar, forward or backward through the sixty-pillar cycle, and the first begins a few years after birth, found by counting the time from birth to a month-opening solar term at three days for one year of life. The classical rule sends the cycles forward for a man born in a yang year and a woman born in a yin year, and backward for the others.

Word origin · etymology

Chinese dàyùn 大運, 'great' with 'turn, fortune'; the English luck pillars follows the pillar of each cycle.

大 dà is 'big, great'. Wiktionary lists for 運 yùn the senses 'to move, revolve', 'to transport', 'to use' and 'fortune, luck, fate', and lists 大運 among its compounds. Pillar is the English Four Pillars word for a stem-and-branch pair, used here for the pair of a cycle, so luck pillar names the pair and luck cycle names the ten years. No claim is made about when 大運 was first used; the oldest text of the rule read for this site is the San Ming Tong Hui of about 1550.^[4][1]

How we know · epistemology

Traditional rule applied by calendar arithmetic

The cycles follow from a stated rule, the month pillar and the instant of a solar term, so the pillars, the direction and the start can be reproduced and checked; the book, other texts and programs differ on how the small remainder is counted and whether ages are counted in completed years or Chinese nominal years. What a cycle means for a life is the tradition's claim, not a measured property of a person or evidence of an outcome, and the classical rule is stated for a man and a woman only.^[1][2]

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