The Property palace: inherited, self-made, four patterns

Field and house, tenth place

Take the name apart first: "field" is farmland and "house" is a dwelling. The palace stands tenth in the twelve, and this site reads it as home, residence and the property setting.

Open the full-size diagram

Property, tenth (green), faces Children (brown) and has its trine on Siblings and Health (purple); Career and Wellbeing on either side are where "flanking" looks.

Tenth on the ring, the Property palace faces the Children palace (no. 4) across the circle, and the Siblings palace (no. 2) and the Health palace (no. 6) sit four steps off on either hand. Those four make its set of four directions. Right beside it are Career (no. 9) and Wellbeing (no. 11), which matter once flanking comes up.

Inherited, or made alone

The Property section of juan 2 has 23 paragraphs covering 21 stars (Wu Qu takes two) and closing on the Dou Jun (斗君); each star entry says whether holdings come down from the ancestors or are set up by the person once this star sits in the palace. Here are counts of several words side by side:

The main line of the section is origin: some stars take on the ancestral estate, some leave it and set up anew, and some in a fall with malefics yield none at all. A single entry often runs several together, as Tian Ji's "gives up the estate, sets up anew" and Tian Tong's "few first, many later, self-made" both show a sequence. Reading this palace begins with telling which thread the book is writing, then looking at the other stars in the palace.

Four patterns that name Property

Besides the star-by-star entries of juan 2, juan 1 keeps a list of patterns sorted into "wealth patterns" and "noble patterns." Four of them name the Property palace:

Of the six "wealth patterns," three bear on the Property palace, and another, "Sun and Moon Flank Wealth," names the Wealth palace. In other words, half of the wealth patterns hang directly on Property. Juan 1 has a general line too:

Among the twelve palaces only Life and Body, Property and Wealth are the essential ones, bringing wealth.

The book here sets Property beside Life and Wealth as three "essential palaces." But it sits under the entry for the star Lu Cun and speaks of what happens when Lu Cun guards those palaces, so it cannot be taken as a rule for every chart.

Flanked into place: Wealth and Shelter Flank the Seal

The original line for this pattern reads:

Xiang guards Life, with Wu and Liang coming to flank it; Property likewise.

That is: Tian Xiang (天相) guards the Life palace with Wu Qu (武曲) and Tian Liang (天梁) sitting on either side to flank it, which makes Wealth and Shelter Flank the Seal; "likewise" for Property means putting Property in place of Life, so the flanking palaces become Career and Wellbeing. Worked through the placement rules, though, this layout never appears: Tian Liang is always one branch after Tian Xiang, so with Tian Xiang in Property it is fixed in Career, and Wu Qu always sits an even number of places from Tian Xiang, so it cannot reach Wellbeing. Across 1,296 iztro charts, Wu Qu and Tian Liang never flank Tian Xiang. The book does not explain how the line is meant to be met, so cite it together with that fact.

Flanking is a relation of adjacent positions, a different angle from opposite and trine; the differences are in opposite, flanking and converging palaces. Another wealth pattern, Shelter and Seal Arch the Body, uses a different relation: the body palace is in Property, and Tian Liang and Tian Xiang shine in from the trine and opposite positions. By the same geometry the two stars are always adjacent, so they cannot both stand on the trine and opposite positions of one palace either.

Sun and Moon on the Jade: at a storehouse branch

Of the four, the one best tested against a table is "Sun and Moon Shine on the Jade":

Sun and Moon on the Jade: the Sun and Moon stand in the Property palace, and prefer a storehouse position.

In Zi Wei Dou Shu the "storehouse" positions are usually the Dragon, Dog, Ox and Goat branches. Juan 2 has a Miao-Wang table of each star's grade on the twelve branches; here are Tai Yang and Tai Yin at those four:

The table shows that "prefer a storehouse position" does not mean the Sun and Moon are bright at all four. The Sun is strongest on Dragon and not at ease on Ox and Dog; the Moon is brightest on Ox and fallen on Dragon. The book says only "prefer a storehouse"; it does not say the four storehouses are equally bright, so the position condition has to be checked against the brightness table.

1. 1

   Find Property, then count its four directions

   Property is no. 10, its opposite is Children, its trine palaces are Siblings and Health, and its neighbors are Career and Wellbeing.

2. 2

   Tell inherited from self-made

   The main line is the source of holdings; note which word each entry uses, then the stars and malefics that share the palace.

3. 3

   Check position conditions before citing a pattern

   Flanking needs adjacency, arching needs trine, opposing needs the opposite palace, a storehouse needs a branch. If the condition fails, do not cite it.

Each neighbor has its own article: Career and Wellbeing. How the four directions are taken is set out in the three sides and four directions.