Four Pillars of Destiny is a Chinese conceptual term that describes the four components creating a person's destiny or fate. The four components within the moment of birth are year, month, day, and time (hour). The four pillars is a component used alongside fortune telling practices such as Zi wei dou shu within the realm of Chinese Astrology. Traditional Chinese characters refers to one of two standard sets of printed Chinese characters. ... Map of eastern China and Taiwan, showing the historic distribution of Mandarin Chinese in light brown. ... Pinyin, more formally called Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; Pinyin: ), is the most common variant of Standard Mandarin romanization system in use. ... This article is about all of the Cantonese (Yue) dialects. ... Jyutping (sometimes spelled Jyutpin) is a romanization system for Standard Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK) in 1993. ... Jamo redirects here. ... Korean writing systems Hangul Hanja Hyangchal Gugyeol Idu Mixed script Korean romanization Revised Romanization of Korean McCune-Reischauer Yale Romanization Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. ... The Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea. ... McCune-Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean language romanization systems, along with the Revised Romanization of Korean, which replaced (a modified) McCune-Reischauer as the official romanization system in South Korea in 2000. ... Zi Wei Dou Shu (Chinese: 紫微斗数, Zi wei dou shu, zi mei dau sou) is a form of fortune-telling in Chinese culture. ... Chinese astrology is the divination of the future from the Chinese calendar, which is based on astronomy, and ancient Chinese philosophy. ...

Terminology

• The four pillars is an English translation of the Chinese dynastic phrase "She Chen Ba Zhi".
• The Chinese term (時辰八字 , She Chen Ba Zhi) literally translates to "Hour of the Eight Characters".
• It is also under the Chinese term (四柱命理學, sei cyu ming lei hok) which literally translates to "The Four Pillars Life-ology".
• It is commonly referred to by the shortened names of "Four Pillars" or "Ba Zhi". One of the most frequently used alternate phrase is "Four Pillars of your birthday".

The following is a timeline of the history of China: For a summary table of the dynasties in Chinese history and their dates, check here. ...

Year

Main article: Chinese Astrology#The 12 zodiac animals

The years are calculated by the 12 zodiac animals with the sexagenary cycle of 60 years. Chinese astrology is the divination of the future from the Chinese calendar, which is based on astronomy, and ancient Chinese philosophy. ... The Chinese sexagenary cycle (Chinese: ; pinyin: ) is a cyclic numeral system of 60 combinations of the two basic cycles, the ten Heavenly Stems (天干; tiāngān) and the twelve Earthly Branches (地支; dìzhī). These have been traditionally used as a means of numbering days and years, not only in China...

Months

Main article: Chinese Astrology#The months - the inner animals

The months are presented by the inner animals. Chinese astrology is the divination of the future from the Chinese calendar, which is based on astronomy, and ancient Chinese philosophy. ...

Hours

Main article: Chinese Astrology#The hours - the secret animals

The hours are represented by the animals within a 24 hour time span. Chinese astrology is the divination of the future from the Chinese calendar, which is based on astronomy, and ancient Chinese philosophy. ...

The Two Schools

Scholarly School (學院派)

It began with Xu Zi Ping (徐子平) at the beginning of Song Dynasty. He founded the pure theoretical basis of the system. Ever since then, scholars continued to do research work on the system and published their work for further development. Representatives of this school and their publications include

Song Dynasty (宋)

• Xu Sheng 宋徐升
• Yuan Hai Zi Ping 淵海子平

Ming Dynasty (明)

• Wan Yu Wu 明萬育吾
• San Ming Tong Hui 三命通會
• Liu Ji 明劉基
• Di Tian Sui 滴天髓

Qing Dynasty (清)

• Chen Su An 清陳素庵
• Meng Li Yue Yan 命理約言

Professional School (江湖派)

The original Chinese name "Jiang Hu Pai" has a negative implication. It refers to people who take Life Reading and Fortune Telling as a profession. Usually it is regarded as a business. These professionals may not know the theory very well. They may just memorize some formulas and also collect a lot of statistical results from their practices.

See also

• The Fates

John Strudwick, A Golden Thread, 1885 (oil on canvas). ...

External links

• Charting the four pillars
• A Four Pillars Calculator
• Forecasting with Bazi 八字 Four Pillars of Destiny