The Six Adversities in BaZi: Liu E and the General Who Never Got the Title

In 119 BCE a Han general who had held a command for fifty-three years was called to answer for a wrong turn in the desert. He had missed the largest battle of his career because he lost the road. Rather than face the court martial, he killed himself at sixty-four. In five decades of service he had never been made a marquis.

The Ming compendium 三命通會, first printed in 1578, quotes an older source on him. 壺中子云六厄為剝官之煞，李廣不封侯是也. The six adversities are the star that strips office, and Li Guang never being enfeoffed is the example given. I read it as atmosphere for years, until I worked out the arithmetic.

Liu e, the six adversities, is a BaZi marker computed from the branch that anchors your elemental triad, usually the year branch and sometimes the day. It falls one branch after the traveling horse of that triad, two branches before its robbery star, and on the exact branch where the element reaches the death station of the twelve-stage cycle. The manual treats it as a timing marker rather than a verdict on a life.

Three rules, one branch

The chapter in 三命通會 卷三 states the same position three ways. 厄者遭乎難者也，常居馬前一辰，刼後二辰，死而不生謂之厄. Adversity is meeting a difficulty. It sits one branch in front of the horse and two behind the robbery star, and it is dead without being alive.

The seat list lets you check the claim:

Read that as a position and something plain comes out. The horse carries movement and reward, robbery carries loss, and the marker sits past the first and short of the second, where the element has finished expressing itself. Whatever liu e marks, it marks the interval between the effort being complete and the result arriving.

The number that never arrives

The name counts six. The chapter lists four seats and never explains the six. I have read it perhaps forty times and cannot find the missing two, in the chapter or the commentaries I trust. The whole treatment is one paragraph of a hundred characters.

I could invent a scheme. Doubling the seats by pillar gives eight rather than six, and no source I have seen does that. The count performs no technical work here. A name with six in it promises ground one branch cannot cover, and the seat list is narrower, one intersection per triad.

What death means at this station

The fourth word in the definition is the one clients flinch at. 死 here is not a death but a station in the twelve-stage cycle that every stem walks through. The breath is finished. Nothing new has started.

三命通會 spends its chapter on those stations warning against exactly the reading people want. 見休囚死絶未必便作凶言. To see an element resting, trapped, dead or cut off is not automatically misfortune. The station names are 假借形容之詞, borrowed figures of speech, as 子平真詮 puts it, and this marker borrows one of them.

The rescue clause and its second half

The manual does provide an exit. 若有救護有扶持，逢生旺兼貴氣相助則吉. If the marker meets rescue and support, if it meets a strong phase or a noble star that helps it, the reading turns favorable. This is standard material for the tradition, and clients quote it back to me with relief. The next clause is the one they skip. 究竟一生蹇滯. After all, a life of obstruction. The chapter grants the exit and then tells you the corridor is long, and a long corridor is what I see in practice.

The general and the astrologer

Li Guang joined the army in 166 BCE and made his name as an archer. Emperor Wen told him that in the founder's time he would have had a fief of ten thousand households without difficulty. During the Rebellion of the Seven Kingdoms he accepted a seal from the Prince of Liang, which the emperor read as a private alliance, and the marquisate did not come. Before the Battle of Mobei, Emperor Wu secretly told Wei Qing to keep Li Guang out of the vanguard because of his reputation for bad fortune. He was sent on an eastern route instead, got lost, and arrived after the fighting ended.

The next part is what a chart cannot show. Li Guang went to an astrologer and physiognomist named Wang Shuo and asked why his career had never reached the rank he wanted. The answer he received was a moral one. He had once put eight hundred surrendered Qiang prisoners to death, and the debt had followed him.

An institution had already priced him as unlucky, and a specialist then explained the price as a personal debt. Both readings remove the question a man could actually work with, which is whether the door was ever going to open for anyone who looked like him.

He was called to explain the wrong turn in 119 BCE. He refused the hearing and killed himself.

The dead balance

Jung's reading of the alchemical nigredo describes the state the marker names, from the inside. In the individuation process, the confrontation with the shadow produces at first "a dead balance, a standstill that hampers moral decisions and makes convictions ineffective or even impossible." The same literature calls it a moment of maximum despair and a prerequisite for development, which is a hard pair of claims to hold at once.

死而不生 is the dead balance in four characters. The manual names the position from outside, where a reader can see a stalled career and a run of years. Jung names it from inside, where nothing is decided and no conviction holds.

A stage is not a sentence. Li Guang stood in the dead balance at the end and could not stay in it, so he would not sit in a room where a verdict would be read aloud. The marker describes an interval. What ended his life was the decision that the interval was the ending.

What I actually do with it

When liu e turns up in a chart, I do not announce a bad decade. Three questions do the work.

The first separates structure from skill. Is there an institution that cannot see what you do, and is there evidence outside your own feelings? A record of passed-over promotions or a manager who has never named your work in public is different from the same complaint with no external record.

The second is a hypothetical most people refuse. If the appointment never came, what would you do on Monday? The answer tells you whether the work is the work or the ticket.

The third is about inheritance. Who taught you that being seen was the payment? A parent whose approval arrived only with a result, a family where the visible child was the loved one. That lesson usually predates any chart.

A client came to me at forty-one, eleven years into a career where two promotions had gone to people he had trained. His chart carried the marker on the year branch. Four sessions on the first question found that his firm had not promoted anyone from his function in six years, which turned a personal verdict into a structural one. He changed employers within the year. The marker did not move, though his reading of it did.

An exercise for the interval

Take a page and draw a line down the middle. On the left, list what you did in the past year that nobody recorded. Not the wins. The repair work, the hour you spent making a colleague look competent, the process you rebuilt that now runs without you.

On the right, copy the list and add six words to each line: and no one ever will.

Read the right column out loud. The reaction is the data. Rage says the merit is real and the expectation of payment is the problem, while relief says the work was never for them to see. Flatness usually means the list is short because you stopped counting.

Then write one sentence about what you would keep doing with no audience. That sentence is the part of your life the star does not own.

What the poem says

The marker's name means meeting a difficulty. It describes a position on a ring, one branch past the horse and two short of the robbery. A position can be described, softened, and lived through.

Li Guang got a poem instead of a fief. 但使龍城飛將在，不教胡馬度陰山. If the Flying General of Longcheng were still here, the Xiongnu horses would not cross the Yin Mountains. Twenty-one centuries of readers know the name.

This article is offered for spiritual guidance and entertainment purposes only. It is not a substitute for medical, legal, or financial advice.