Tian Chu: a minor star that follows the year stem

The verse that turns ten stems into animals

Now and then a chart page shows the two characters Tian Chu (天厨), which read literally as the heavenly kitchen. The site's engine places it with a very short recipe: ask for the stem of the birth year, look it up in a ten-row table, and ignore month, day and hour.

Open the full-size diagram

Comparison sketch: the verse is the comment in the iztro source, the landing spots are checked against the site engine, and rows of the same color share a spot.

The picture sets the ten stems side by side, with the wording of the verse in the middle and the branch it points to on the right. The verse is the comment above the "place Tian Chu" code in iztro, the open-source engine behind the site's charts. Our translation:

Yang Wood and Yin Fire eat at the Snake's mouth; Yin Wood, Yang Earth and Yin Metal go to the Horse's side. Yang Fire gets it from the Rat's mouth, Yin Earth eats in the Monkey's room. Yang Metal eats on the Tiger's head; Yang Water is the Rooster, Yin Water the Pig's hall.

The verse uses animals in place of branches: the Snake's mouth is the Snake branch, the Horse is the Horse branch, and so on down to the Pig. That habit is familiar. The verse for Tian Kui and Tian Yue in volume 2 of the Zi Wei Dou Shu Quan Shu (紫微斗数全书) works the same way, with "Yang Wood, Yang Earth and Yang Metal, Ox and Goat". As for the word "eat", it can be read as "settle at": the kitchen of a Yang Wood or Yin Fire year settles at the Snake's mouth, which is the Snake position.

Ten stems, only seven spots

Grouped by landing spot, the ten stems use only seven branches. The Snake and the Horse are shared by several stems, and the other five spots belong to one stem each.

Each stem comes round once every ten years, so across birth years three in ten put the star on the Horse, two in ten on the Snake and one in ten on each of the rest. The Ox, Rabbit, Dragon, Goat and Dog positions never receive Tian Chu under this rule.

There is no addition rule hiding in the table. Going from Yang Wood to Yin Wood moves the star from the Snake to the Horse, and the very next stem, Yang Fire, jumps back to the Rat. A distribution like this has to be looked up or memorized; no "stem number plus some amount" reproduces it.

One name, two tables: the BaZi Heavenly Kitchen

BaZi has a symbolic star written with the same characters, the Heavenly Kitchen noble (天厨贵人). The site's engine works in two moves: from the Day Master it counts to the Eating God, then asks on which branch that god takes its Emolument, and the noble sits there. The name is the same but the starting point is not: Zi Wei reads the stem of the birth year, BaZi reads the Day Master.

Side by side the difference is plain:

Only the first two rows match. How the BaZi column is derived is worked through in Heavenly Kitchen: count the Eating God, then find its Emolument. The two stars live in different charts, one in a Zi Wei palace and one beside a BaZi pillar, and each follows its own table; the landing spot of one cannot be transplanted onto the other.

The same Tiger spot gets different palace names

Once the branch is fixed, reading a chart still needs the palace name it falls into. Take a Yang Metal year (1990 was one): Tian Chu is always on the Tiger. Which palace the Tiger spot is depends on where Life sits, and Life moves with the birth month and hour. The three charts below share a birthday, March 10, 1990, and differ only in the hour:

The counting is mechanical. Start with Life as the first palace and move back one branch for each palace, following the fixed order of palace names (the order and the topic of each palace are in what the twelve palaces discuss). With Life on the Pig, Siblings is on the Dog and Partner on the Rooster, and the count reaches Property exactly on the Tiger.

1. 1

   Fix the year stem

   Use the stem of the birth year, not the Day Master and not the month stem.

2. 2

   Turn the verse into a branch

   Look it up in the ten-row table above and take one of the seven branches.

3. 3

   Find Life, then count

   The branch of Life comes from month and hour; from there move back one branch per palace until you reach the branch of the star.

The adjective star Tian Fu (天福), not to be confused with the major star of the same romanization, also follows the birth-year stem alone, but its spot is derived from the official star and that star's Lu rather than read off a verse. The full minor-star list is in what the supporting, malefic and minor stars each do.