The Six Clashes in BaZi: Why the Opposite Sign Is Not the Enemy

The Chart in Red Ink

A woman sent me her chart last spring with the four pillars marked in red. Somebody on a forum had circled three clashes and told her the chart was broken. She carried that line for two years. I found the same three clashes, plus one detail the forum had dropped. Two sat in the palaces where her working life had turned, and both turns had gone well.

What the Six Clashes Are

The six clashes (六衝, liu chong) are a set of six opposing branch pairs that face each other across the twelve-branch wheel, and in BaZi they mark where one part of a chart moves against another. Every pair stands seven places apart.

The Rat faces the Horse, the Ox the Goat, the Tiger the Monkey, the Rabbit the Rooster, the Dragon the Dog, and the Snake the Pig. Water stands opposite fire in two pairs, wood opposite metal in two more, earth opposite earth in the last two.

These twelve characters also generate the six combinations, the six harms and the three punishments.

The Arithmetic of Seven

The chapter is called 論衝擊 in the Ming manual Sanming Tonghui (三命通會), printed in 1578, and its heading names what it describes. 對靣相衝之氣，謂之一七煞者是也. The qi that faces and strikes is what the sources call the one-seven sha.

Count from the Rat, which is one, to the Horse, which is seven, and the pair stands seven places apart. Six places apart makes a combination and seven makes a clash. 數中六則合，七則過. Six is the middle and stops there. Seven has gone past it and strikes.

The same arithmetic governs the Heavenly Stems, where 甲 and 庚 stand seven apart and strike on the same logic, the ground under the five stem combinations. In the Book of Changes the Kun hexagram works with six and never reaches seven, because 七乃天地之窮數, seven is the exhaustion number where yin and yang have nowhere left to go. The Return hexagram says it comes back after seven days, so strike and return share one number.

What Faces What

The six clashes form three axes. 子午卯酉, the four cardinal branches, stand at the four compass points, and the wheel splits them into two opposing pairs. 寅申巳亥, the four birth branches, open each season and split the same way. 辰戌丑未, the four storage branches, hold the endings and split again.

The Tiger against the Monkey sets two travel-horse seats against each other, so that pair reads as movement meeting movement.

What the Manuals Say a Clash Actually Does

The chapter opens with the verdict everyone remembers. 相衝者，十二支戰擊之神，大槩為凶. The branches that strike are warring spirits, broadly inauspicious. Then it qualifies the verdict.

Where the two sides generate each other, the clash produces the best results in the book. A person carrying 辛巳 in one pillar and 癸亥 in another meets the 巳亥 clash, and since the paired sound-element reckoning puts metal on the first and water on the second, the strike pours metal into water. The reading turns into reputation spreading outward. 有為福之甚者.

Where the two sides control each other instead, the reading splits with the season. In a strong state the person comes out bold, and in a spent state the same pair turns harsh.

The storage branches are the exception to every caution. 辰戌丑未所藏，為十干財官印綬等物，尤喜衝激. The stores hold wealth, rank and the seal of office, and the manual says they welcome being struck, because a store has to be opened before it gives anything up. That is the same argument as the piece on the four vaults, applied to the pairs that open them.

When all four birth branches appear in one chart, or all four cardinal branches, 反成大格，不以衝擊論, and the strikes stop counting.

One pair it singles out. 甲子見甲午, two branches that clash while the stem above them is identical. 同類相衝，多破祖業. A same-kind clash breaks what a person inherited and hardens the will, and even in a chart with high rank and a good name one failure is certain. 終有一失. I have met that pair in people who built something from nothing and then could not sit still once it worked.

Fortune and Trouble Run Both Ways

The second half of the chapter gets useful. 一點七煞，命吉則衝發，命凶則為禍. Meet the clash with a good chart and it fires the chart up, and meet it with a poor one and it makes trouble. Then comes the image that carries the rest of the page. 禍聚之地有他位來衝，謂之破禍成福. Where trouble has collected and something arrives to strike it, the strike breaks the trouble apart and turns it into fortune. 福聚之地逢他位來衝，則破福成禍. A good patch struck the same way breaks apart into loss.

The clash works as a release valve, and what it releases was already stored there. A chart quietly accumulating a problem meets the clash year as relief, and a chart on an easy stretch meets it as loss.

The Yujing, quoted in the chapter, turns this into a rule for direction. 相衝法，吉象宜來衝我，凶象我欲衝他. Let a favorable image come and strike me, and let me do the striking when the image is hostile. Direction is most of the reading. The two branches are not equals, so the first job is to decide which one carries the chart's work and which one is idle, then whether each side stands supported.

A rank seat struck by its opposite is a rank lost, and a broken stem combination never held.

One more name. 若月衝日時，時衝年，名仇讐煞. When the month strikes the day or hour, or the hour strikes the year, the sources call it the enmity sha, read as lasting friction with people, long illness or a sudden end.

Then the chapter does the honest thing. It prints four poems that contradict each other, then closes with a sentence I would put on every chart report. 觀諸詩，見衝破有吉有凶，不可槩論. Breaking by clash produces both fortune and misfortune, and no blanket verdict is possible.

Enantiodromia, or the Opposite That Completes

Jung had a word for a chart running into its own opposite. He called it enantiodromia, from the Greek for running contrary, and in Psychological Types he defines it as the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time (Enantiodromia). He took the term from Heraclitus, who named the regulative function of opposites and held that everything runs into its opposite sooner or later. One-sidedness builds its own counterweight. Lean long enough one way and something in the system starts moving the other.

The I Ching makes the same move, where a yang line at its extreme turns into a yin line, which is the argument the BaZi chapter makes with its seven days in a different alphabet. Both treat the turn as structural, and the person living through it meets the result as something arriving from outside.

Read that way, a clash marks where a chart's counterweight sits. The branch you cannot stand in your own four pillars is often the function you never had to use. The one you cannot stand in somebody else's chart is usually that same function wearing their face, which is the shadow doing what it does.

Reading a Clash in Your Own Chart

Clashes draw more letters than anything else in my inbox, and I have read close to four thousand charts in fifteen years.

Name both branches and the pillar each one sits in. A clash touching the day pillar reads inside the person, while one between the year and the hour reads between the family they came from and the life they built.

Decide direction. Which branch carries the work and which is idle, then whether the working branch is strong, because direction and state together decide whether a strike frees something or removes it. If a storage branch is involved, check what it holds, since striking a store that holds rank differs from striking an empty one.

Watch the timing. A clash activates when a year or a month brings the opposing branch in, which is why a pair quiet for twenty years can describe a year of movement.

The client with the red ink had three. Two were working branches in storage palaces that had opened at career turns, and the third touched her day branch and named a part of her temperament she had avoided for years.

A Question to Sit With

Take one trait in yourself you would rather not have. The impatience, the need to win, the bluntness you apologize for later. Then find its opposite in your own behavior, because a chart that holds a clash holds both ends. Write down where the two trade places. Most people can name what sets that switch off within a page.

The classical reading treats that pair as one circuit, workable once both ends are visible, and you can lay out your own four pillars with the BaZi calculator.

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