Chinese Zodiac Compatibility: What BaZi Actually Compares

Look up the Rat and the Horse on a zodiac compatibility chart and you'll find them at the bottom, usually as the worst match there is. The chart isn't making that up. It comes from a real relation in BaZi: 子 and 午 sit opposite each other on the circle of twelve branches, and opposite branches clash.

What the chart leaves out is everything else. It compares one character of each person's eight, the branch of the year pillar, and that character is shared by everyone born in the same twelve months.

This post is about where the animal chart comes from, what a reading of two whole charts compares instead, and one pair the animal chart would warn off: a Horse and a Rat whose charts tell a different story.

Where the chart comes from

The twelve animals are the twelve earthly branches, and BaZi reads the relations between branches from where they sit on the circle. Three of those relations make up the popular chart.

Clash, 沖. Branches directly opposite each other clash: the Rat and the Horse, the Ox and the Goat, and so on round the circle. These are the chart's worst matches.

Six harmony, 六合. Six fixed pairs combine: the Rat with the Ox, the Tiger with the Pig, and four more.

Three harmony, 三合. The twelve also fall into four groups of three, spaced a third of the circle apart, each belonging to an element: the Monkey, Rat and Dragon to Water; the Pig, Rabbit and Goat to Wood; the Tiger, Horse and Dog to Fire; the Snake, Rooster and Ox to Metal.

The chart's best matches are an animal's six-harmony partner and the other two members of its group, merged into one list:

Many charts go further and mark pairs that harm or punish each other as poor matches. Those relations are part of the tradition too, but this site doesn't compute the punishments, breaks and harms, so they're left out here.

So the chart is BaZi, as far as it goes. The trouble is how far that is.

One character in eight

The animal is the branch of your year pillar, and BaZi reads the year pillar as origins and inheritance: the world you were born into, not who you are. Everyone born in the same twelve months shares it, so a chart that matches people by animal is really matching the years they were born in.

That isn't nothing. When two animals clash, what clashes is the year palace, which is read as origins, so it says something about where two people come from. It doesn't say what they are to each other.

The animal can also be the wrong one. BaZi's year begins at 立春, around 4 February, so anyone born in January has the previous year's animal, and the weeks between 立春 and Lunar New Year can give the two calendars different animals. In 2027 the Goat arrives on the morning of 4 February in East Asia, two days before Lunar New Year, as the Fire Goat post explains.

And it's one character. A chart has four branches, so two charts meet in sixteen pairs of branches. The animal chart reads one of them.

What a full reading compares

Korean has a word for checking two charts against each other, 宮合, gunghap, and doing it before a wedding is still part of how saju is used there. This site's compatibility reading compares two things.

Every branch against every branch. All sixteen pairs, each weighted by the two palaces it joins. The year and hour palaces count 1.0, the month 1.5, and the day, which is also the spouse palace, 3.0. So the cell where the two year branches meet, the one the animal chart is about, is one of the four lightest of the sixteen. The cell where the two day branches meet is the heaviest by far: 3.0 × 3.0 against 1.0 × 1.0, nine times the weight. Harmonies and repeated branches count as bond, clashes as friction, and the totals are set against what an average pair would produce over all 144 ways two branches can meet.

What each chart brings the other. Every stem and hidden stem in one chart is read as one of the Ten Gods to the other person's day master, weighted the way the site weights a chart's own characters. Your chart has an element it needs most, usually set by its strength verdict. The reading measures how much of it the other chart brings, against an even share, and how much the other chart brings of what yours could do without. It does this in both directions, separately, and names the verdict from it: Mutual Supply when each chart brings the other more than an even share of what it needs, One-Way Supply when only one does, and Level Ground when neither does.

It reads two charts the same way whether you've picked partner, friend, colleague or family. Two charts are what they are to each other.

A Horse and a Rat

Take the chart this blog has used from the start, cast for 04:00 on 28 February 1990 in Seoul: 庚午 戊寅 甲子 丙寅. Its year is 庚午, a Horse. It was born on a Jia Zi 甲子 day, so its day master is 甲, yang Wood. It reads as strong, and it needs Earth.

For the other chart, take someone born at noon on 22 February 1996, also in Seoul: 丙子 庚寅 己丑 庚午. A Rat, born on a Ji Chou 己丑 day, with 己, yin Earth, as day master. It also reads as strong, and it needs Water.

On the animal chart, that's the worst match there is. Here's what the full reading makes of it.

The year clash is there, in one of the lightest cells. 午 and 子 clash, between the two year palaces.

The heaviest cell is a harmony. The two day branches are 子 and 丑, a six harmony. Both are spouse palaces, so this is the cell with nine times the weight of the years.

The clash turns up again, somewhere heavier. The 1990 chart's day branch is 子 and the 1996 chart's hour branch is 午. A day palace against an hour palace weighs three times as much as two year palaces, so the Horse-and-Rat clash counts for more here than it does between the animals. Elsewhere the two charts share some branches, both having 寅 in the month, and their 寅 and 午 make halves of the 寅午戌 Fire group three times over. Added up, the pair carries more bond than an average pair and slightly more friction.

The day masters. 甲 and 己 are one of the five stem combinations in the classical texts, 甲己合, but this site doesn't read stem combinations. It reads each day master as a Ten God to the other: 己 is the 1990 chart's Direct Wealth, and 甲 is the 1996 chart's Direct Officer. Traditional matching gives those two relations extra meaning, since Wealth stands for a wife in a man's chart and Officer for a husband in a woman's. This site doesn't use either person's sex, and reads the spouse palace instead.

Supply runs one way. The 1996 chart brings more Earth than an even share: its day master 己, and the 己 inside 丑 and inside 午. Earth is what the 1990 chart needs. The 1990 chart has little Water, only the 癸 inside its 子, and Water is what the 1996 chart needs. So the verdict is One-Way Supply, toward the 1990 chart.

A worst match on the animal chart, then, and something more particular in the two charts: the closest relation between them is a harmony, the clash the animals show sits where the reading weighs least, and one of the two would be getting more of what it needs than the other. None of that says whether two people will be happy together, and a reading that claimed to would be claiming more than a chart can tell you.

Where this site stands

The compatibility reading here compares two whole charts: every branch against every branch, weighted by palace, and what each chart brings of what the other needs. It doesn't read stem combinations or the punishments, breaks and harms, and it describes how two charts meet, not how a relationship will go. The first reading is free, and it's the whole reading, not a preview.

The animal chart is a real piece of BaZi, cut down to one branch each. Put the rest of the two charts back and the answer can change completely.