Tian Yao: month sets the branch, hour the palace

Month 1 sits on Ox, then forward

The place of Tian Yao (天姚) answers one question: in which lunar month was the person born.

The placement rhymes in juan 2 of the Quan Shu (紫微斗数全书), the classic Zi Wei compendium, give Tian Yao and Tian Xing one shared entry, and the Tian Yao half reads:

Tian Yao starts from the Ox for month one and runs forward to the birth month; there it is set.

As steps: month 1 is Ox, month 2 is Tiger, every month moves one branch forward, and the count stops at the birth month. That branch holds Tian Yao.

Open the full-size diagram

Ring: Tian Yao follows the juan 2 rhyme "month 1 on the Ox, forward to the birth month" and was checked month by month in the engine; the four teal branches come from the first line of the verse in juan 1.

The ring starts at Ox and turns clockwise through lunar months 1 to 12, one branch per month. The engine on this site agrees with the rhyme: charting all twelve months, Tian Yao lands exactly where the count says. The four teal branches are the ones named in a verse of the first juan, taken up in the next section. The month here is the lunar month, and a leap month has to be converted first, which section four shows.

The four branches the verse names

At the end of the entry "What does Tian Yao govern?" in the first juan come several verses, and the first line of the first one is about position:

Tian Yao roams the Dog, the Rabbit and the Rooster, and then enters the Fish as well.

In the old pairing of the zodiac signs with the branches, the Fish palace is the Pig branch, and the answer in the same entry also mentions "dwelling in Pig". Turn the Dog, Rabbit, Rooster and Pig branches into birth months and they are lunar months 10, 3, 9 and 11.

What the book says about Tian Yao comes in three layers. The placement rhyme speaks only of position. The verse names positions. The answer paragraph is a long run of conditional remarks, with brightness and companion stars (meeting malefic stars, adding Hong Luan and so on) used as conditions and with wording that dwells on conduct and romance. This page takes the first two layers and makes the position clear; the answer paragraph is an old book describing one kind of situation, and none of it is turned into a conclusion about the reader.

The month cancels: the palace follows the hour

Once the branch is known, it still has to be counted into a palace. Life takes two steps: first walk forward from Tiger (month 1) to the birth month, then, from that landing spot, walk backward by hours starting at the Rat hour (details in the Life and Body palaces). Each later month moves the Life branch one step forward, and Tian Yao one step forward as well, so the gap between them never changes. The month drops out, and the palace holding Tian Yao is fixed by the hour alone.

Chart all twelve hours of 28 August 1990, which is lunar month 7, day 9: Tian Yao stays on Goat the whole time, while the Life branch slides from Monkey back to Rooster, and the palace name of Goat changes step by step.

The pattern is plain. The Rat hour puts Tian Yao in Siblings, the Ox hour in Life, the Tiger hour in Parents, and from there every later hour moves the palace name one place back along the palace order. Twelve hours fill all twelve palaces exactly once.

Leap months: convert first, then count

Tian Yao is counted by month, and the lunar calendar has leap months. The site default is to count days 1 to 15 of a leap month as the month before and day 16 onward as the month after, with other settings unchanged. Try it on the leap month 4 of 2020:

That makes Tian Yao a handy checkpoint when two chart tools are compared: it depends only on the converted month, so a difference of one branch shows that the two sides used different month numbers. How schools handle leap months is in leap months, hours and the day boundary.

Checking Tian Yao on a chart: from input to palace

The star that is also fixed by month and always keeps a fixed distance from this one is Tian Xing; to see which minor stars follow the month and which the year, compare auxiliary, malefic and minor stars.