The year ahead
Your BaZi year ahead
Whether you clash with Tai Sui this year, and the two layers the January lists leave out: what the year is about for your Day Master, and whether its elements are ones your chart is short of.
The six ways a year can meet you
Tai Sui (太歲) is not a property of your animal. It is a relation between the year’s branch and yours, and there are six named ones: 值 meeting, when the branches match; 沖 clashing, when they sit opposite; 刑 punishment; 害 harm; 破 destruction; and 六合 harmony, which is the one nobody puts on a poster because it does not sell talismans.
The clash is the strongest and it reads as movement rather than misfortune — moves, job changes, relationships beginning or ending. Somewhere in the retelling that became bad luck, and then became something to buy protection from. The tradition says disruption.
Why the year turns in February
The BaZi year begins at 立春, Start of Spring, around 4 February — not on 1 January and not at Chinese New Year either, which moves. A forecast that switches over on New Year’s Day is reading the wrong pillar for about five weeks a year, and anyone born in that window is given the wrong animal for their whole life.