Ten Evils Great Defeat in BaZi: The Day Pillar Named After an Unpardonable Crime

A man of thirty-one sent me his chart with an app screenshot attached. The app had graded his day pillar and printed the result in red: 十惡大敗, ten evils, great defeat. He wanted a number. How many years he had. I asked what he had stopped doing since he read it. He said he had not applied for a transfer in March, and it was now October.

Shi e da bai is a BaZi day-pillar marker that applies to ten of the sixty day pillars, the ones whose stem has its salary seat sitting inside the void of its own ten-day decade. The name comes from criminal law and from battlefield reporting, and the rule underneath is subtraction.

Two verdicts in one name

The chapter 論十惡大敗 in the Ming compendium 三命通會, first printed in 1578, opens with the metaphor before it reaches the rule. 十惡者譬律法中人犯十惡重罪在所不赦. Ten evils, like a person under the law who commits one of the ten unpardonable crimes, beyond amnesty. 大敗者譬兵法中與敵交戰大敗無一生還. Great defeat, like an army broken in the field with nobody coming home.

The legal half was living law when the book was printed. The Ten Abominations were a list of offences in traditional Chinese law that stood outside the ordinary mercy of the state. The first three carried the death penalty, and under the Ming the imperial privileges known as the Eight Deliberations did not apply to them at all. So 不赦 has a precise sense here: the machinery of leniency stops at the door.

The military half does the emotional work. A rout is a formation that breaks and a field where nobody walks back, and putting both words on a chart informs a person that their life is illegal and lost.

The seat that cannot be held

The rule is one line. 六甲旬中十個日値祿入空亡, ten days across the six decades whose 祿 falls into the void.

祿 is the salary seat, the branch where a stem reaches the 臨官 phase that the twelve stages call taking office. 甲 holds 寅, 乙 holds 卯, 丙 and 戊 hold 巳, 丁 and 己 hold 午, 庚 holds 申, 辛 holds 酉, 壬 holds 亥, 癸 holds 子. It is the position where a stem is paid for being what it is.

空亡 is the gap at the end of a decade, and ten days from 甲 use every stem and only ten branches, so two go unassigned. The decade beginning 甲子 covers 子 through 酉 and leaves 戌 and 亥 empty.

Put the two together and the ten days fall out on their own:

Ten days out of sixty. One birthday in six lands on one of them.

None of that mentions a life. The stem's own prosperity seat is the one position its decade cannot occupy, the way a twelve-branch calendar cannot be filled by a ten-stem count.

The printed list in my edition gives 乙丑, yet 乙's seat is 卯, which is not void in 乙丑's decade. 己丑 is the day that fits, so either the character is a variant or the copy slipped.

The book's own hedge

Then the chapter changes its mind.

命中犯者當以日上見之為是其餘不論. Only the day pillar counts. Year, month and hour do not.

况犯者未必皆㐫. The person carrying it is not necessarily unlucky. 若内有吉神相扶貴氣相輔當為吉論. If supportive stars stand inside the chart and noble qi comes alongside, read it as good.

The compiler keeps the title and drops the verdict inside the same paragraph, and I have quoted that pair of sentences to more clients than any other line.

Three ways of filing the same ten days

The chapter does not stop at one method.

元白經 files the days by the year that opposes them. 蓋以年支干衝日支干無祿為忌. Where the year clashes the day and the day has no salary seat, the reading applies. Its ten rows mostly clash on stem and branch both. The other two land on day stems 戊 and 己, which belong to no stem clash at all.

釋敎玄黄經 files the same material by month instead, 甲己 years in 戊辰 month on 戊戌 day. One line of that table carries no entries. 丁壬年無. For a whole pair of year stems the method has nothing to say.

So one chart can be flagged by the decade rule, cleared by the year table and never mentioned by the month table. Which page your reader opened decides whether you get a verdict, which is a fact about how the book was assembled.

Too little and too much

The chapter keeps walking past the crime. It lists 四廢日, the four waste days: spring 庚申, summer 壬子, autumn 甲寅, winter 丙午. 廢 means caged and useless, and a person carrying one starts things without finishing them.

Then 天地轉日, the heaven-and-earth turning days: spring 乙卯 and 辛卯, summer 丙午 and 戊午, autumn 辛酉 and 癸酉, winter 壬子 and 丙子. There the stem and its sound element are both at full strength in their own season, and 物過則損, a thing pushed past fullness loses something. The 玄微賦 illustrates that class with Han Xin, who lived from 231 to 196 BCE and never lost a battle. He was lured into a trap at Changle Palace on the empress's order and his clan was wiped out.

A chapter that opened on an unpardonable crime ends on balance. 大抵造化最喜中和，太過不及皆不為吉. The chart wants the middle, and excess and deficit are both bad. The waste days are deficit. The turning days are excess. The final clause adds a condition: 若柱中不及有生扶太過有制抑不在此論. Where the chart supports what is weak or restrains what is strong, none of it applies.

A man told his day pillar is a crime has in fact been told his salary seat sits in a gap. One of those is a sentence passed on him, the other a shape you can look at.

Jung's stopwatch

Feeling your chest change at a phrase is not the same as reading a mechanism, and Jung spent his early career measuring the gap.

At the Burghölzli, the Zurich clinic where he worked from 1900 to 1908, he read lists of a hundred words to patients and timed each reply in fifths of a second. What showed up when the timing broke was a complex, which he described as a knot of unconscious feelings and beliefs, detectable indirectly through behavior that is puzzling or hard to account for. He coined the word, and for a while he called his whole body of theory complex psychology.

Set that beside this chapter. 十惡大敗 is a stimulus phrase carrying a legal verdict, a battlefield image and a threat in four characters. The arithmetic underneath is a subtraction you can check with a pencil. A person who reads the name and cannot sleep has had a complex response to a name. Work out the decade and you have read the mechanism.

Jung also held that the core of any complex is an archetype, which puts the reaction in ordinary mental life rather than personal weakness. The work is to notice which word you answered, and how long you hesitated.

I have seen both outcomes with the same pillar. One woman with 甲辰 built a career around never getting the promotion, with fifteen years of evidence ready. A man with 甲辰 had never heard of the marker and was doing well, so the difference was in what each had done with the word.

Working it for yourself

Take your day pillar and find your stem's salary seat. Find its decade, note the two void branches, and check whether your seat is one of them. That tells you about an arrangement rather than a future.

Then the part that pays. The marker says the place where you are naturally paid for being what you are is the place the structure leaves open. Write down the one thing you do well that has no slot in your present life, the competent thing nobody has asked you to do.

Keep it a week and watch how often you hand it to someone else to be paid for.

The man of thirty-one wrote back two weeks later. He had put in for the transfer, and nobody at the interview mentioned the day pillar.

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