式Mantic arts dossier · The Three Cosmic Boards and spatiotemporal methods
大六壬
Dà Liùrén·Great Liuren
A heaven-earth board places the monthly general over the divination hour; Four Lessons are built from the day stem-branch, followed by Three Transmissions, generals and lesson patterns, interpreted within the tradition as a matter's origin, development and resolution.
- Aliases
- Liuren divine lessons, Liuren board, Four Lessons and Three Transmissions
- Formation
- Han cosmic boards form an early background; mature textual systems are confirmed by Tang-Song
- Evidence status
Study notes & citation
大六壬. Institute of Mantic Arts. https://www.manticarts.com/en/arts/daliuren
On this page
01Core principles
Core principles
Translate formulas into structure: what enters, how the model is arranged, and which relations drive interpretation.
After the monthly general is placed over the hour, four relations are derived from the day stem and branch. Rule families such as overcoming, matching, depth and remote control select three transmissions, which are read with twelve generals, natal signs and pattern classes.
Key concepts
- monthly general over the hour
- Four Lessons
- Three Transmissions
- Twelve Generals
02Origins and historical development
Origins and historical development
Keep traditional accounts, surviving evidence and later transformations distinct.
Han cosmic boards show a shared background of rotating boards, Dipper, lunar lodges and calendrical signs. The received Four Lessons and Three Transmissions are clear in Tang-Song sources; later practitioners left extensive case records.
TEXT / METHOD / EVIDENCE
Heaven–earth plates, Four Lessons and Three Transmissions
Liuren can be reconstructed in layers: a relation between two branch cycles, four readings derived from the day, and conditional transmission-selection rules. This study joins a working board to textual locators and a comparison of witnesses.
Objects, received texts and catalogued witnesses
The National Museum of China describes a bronze earth plate whose heaven plate is lost. The object supports questions about construction and arrangement. The page supplies no excavation date to cite here. Surviving hardware does not establish the presence of every rule found in later Four Lessons and Three Transmissions manuals.
Procedural locators refer to the online transcription of the Heart-Seal Rhapsody in Liuren Zhinan, volume one. A separate HathiTrust record for Yuding Liuren Zhizhi has two juan in its title, seven physical volumes, manuscript edition and a Kangxi-period date. Intellectual divisions, bound units, edition type and catalogue dating are separate fields. Their differences should be preserved when describing the witness.
Placing the monthly general over the hour
Paragraph 4 gives Hai over Wu, followed by Zi over Wei. Number the earth branches Zi through Hai from zero to eleven. The monthly-general index minus the hour index gives the relative offset. Add that offset to each earth position and take a non-negative remainder modulo twelve to obtain its heaven branch. This is a modern mathematical description of the stated placement, not a claim that the historical text used modular notation.
Monthly general and month branch are distinct inputs. The reference sequence follows the text's major-solar-term changes; the experiment accepts a manually chosen general and hour. Converting a civil date would require solar-term instants, time zone and a declared calendrical method. That conversion is outside this experiment. No birth details are requested or retained, and changing a selector represents a structural comparison rather than a personal consultation.
Stem lodges and the two chains of Four Lessons
Paragraph 3 supplies stem lodges: Jia at Yin, Yi at Chen, Bing and Wu at Si, Ding and Ji at Wei, Geng at Shen, Xin at Xu, Ren at Hai and Gui at Chou. The first lesson reads the heaven branch over the day stem's lodge; the second reads again from that resulting branch's earth position. The third and fourth start from the day branch and repeat the two-stage reading.
Some printed layouts place the lessons from right to left. This experiment explicitly numbers them one through four, displaying lower item, upper branch and lookup position. Screen direction is not used as an implicit rule. Repeated upper branches remain visible. Deduplicating them prematurely would discard the very relationships needed to investigate why a lesson pattern is classified in a particular way.
From lessons to transmissions: conditional branches
Paragraph 6 first treats restricted cases: a single lower-overcomes-upper relation, or, in its absence, a single upper-overcomes-lower relation. It then describes successive readings for the initial, middle and final transmissions. Later passages discuss multiple candidates, remote overcoming, Maoxing, Bieze and repeated or opposed arrangements. A reconstruction must preserve each branch's prerequisites rather than applying the first visible instruction to every board.
The experiment ends at the plates and Four Lessons; it does not output an initial transmission or a prediction. This scope permits exhaustive checks across its valid inputs. For transmission research, prepare five fields: prerequisites, candidate set, selection rule, exceptions and textual locator. Run a branch only after its conditions are established. Retaining unresolved candidates makes disagreement between textual interpretations inspectable.
Comparing two Liuren witnesses
Online transcription makes passages searchable, but CText Wiki material may contain unreviewed readings. This review could consult indexed passages; direct page access was restricted and the base edition has not been checked. The present contribution is a set of locators and an original structural demonstration, not a critical edition. The separate library record offers a route toward an identifiable physical witness without implying that its entire text has been collated here.
Hold the inputs constant and reconstruct each witness separately. If results diverge, locate the first difference: changing the general, assigning a stem lodge, forming lessons, selecting transmissions or interpretation. Identical outputs reached by different rules also deserve separate records. Textual agreement, algorithmic agreement and predictive validity are different research questions; demonstrating one does not automatically settle the others.
STRUCTURE LAB / 012
Heaven–earth plates and Four Lessons
Change the general or hour to compare the plates; select a day to inspect its stem lodge and Four Lessons. The dark outer ring is the earth plate, the gold inner ring the heaven plate. Highlighted positions show the general placed above the hour.
Cyclic offset: 5 / 12
Stem lodge: 甲 → 寅 · Yin
- Lesson 1甲未
Earth lookup: 寅 → 未
- Lesson 2未子
Earth lookup: 未 → 子
- Lesson 3子巳
Earth lookup: 子 → 巳
- Lesson 4巳戌
Earth lookup: 巳 → 戌
Twelve-position lookup table
| Earth plate | Heaven plate |
|---|---|
| 子 · Zi | 巳 · Si |
| 丑 · Chou | 午 · Wu |
| 寅 · Yin | 未 · Wei |
| 卯 · Mao | 申 · Shen |
| 辰 · Chen | 酉 · You |
| 巳 · Si | 戌 · Xu |
| 午 · Wu | 亥 · Hai |
| 未 · Wei | 子 · Zi |
| 申 · Shen | 丑 · Chou |
| 酉 · You | 寅 · Yin |
| 戌 · Xu | 卯 · Mao |
| 亥 · Hai | 辰 · Chen |
Manual-input teaching model for plates and Four Lessons only. No civil-date conversion, heavenly generals, transmissions or prognostication. The diagram displays branch order; it is not a replica of an excavated object.
Stem lodges and major-solar-term reference
Ten stem lodges
- 甲
- 寅
- 乙
- 辰
- 丙
- 巳
- 丁
- 未
- 戊
- 巳
- 己
- 未
- 庚
- 申
- 辛
- 戌
- 壬
- 亥
- 癸
- 丑
| Major solar term | General branch |
|---|---|
| Rain Water | 亥 |
| Spring Equinox | 戌 |
| Grain Rain | 酉 |
| Grain Full | 申 |
| Summer Solstice | 未 |
| Major Heat | 午 |
| End of Heat | 巳 |
| Autumn Equinox | 辰 |
| Frost's Descent | 卯 |
| Minor Snow | 寅 |
| Winter Solstice | 丑 |
| Major Cold | 子 |
This table gives a sequence, not annual transition instants. Cases near a boundary need a separately documented calendar calculation and time zone.
A four-step research record
Fix the inputs
Record day stem, day branch, monthly general and hour with the calendrical method. The experiment uses the sixty-day cycle to keep pairings valid.
Check the plate relation
Confirm the general lies above the chosen hour, then check adjacency and wraparound at Hai and Zi.
Record each lesson lookup
Record the lodge or day branch, earth lookup and resulting heaven branch for every lesson, including repetitions.
Separate transmission rules
Identify the edition, prerequisites and exceptions for each transmission rule. Leave unverified branches unresolved.
WORKED EXAMPLE
From material to claim
Original exercise: choose Jia-Zi day, Hai monthly general and Wu hour. The heaven branch advances five positions relative to each earth position; Jia lodges at Yin. This constructed combination is for structural checking, not an identified historical divination case.
Hai lies above Wu. Yin maps to Wei and Wei to Zi, giving Wei and Zi as the first two upper branches. Zi maps to Si and Si to Xu, giving Si and Xu for the third and fourth. Each lookup can be checked against the experiment's twelve-position table.
- Does Hai lie above Wu?
- Does lesson one start at Jia's lodge, Yin?
- Do lessons two and four perform a new earth-position lookup?
Review questions
What happens when general and hour coincide?
The offset is zero and every branch aligns with itself: the positional configuration called Fuyin. Its full transmission procedure requires additional textual rules.
What if general and hour differ by six positions?
Each heaven branch opposes its earth position, the positional configuration called Fanyin. This describes a board relation, not a conclusion about events.
Does moving the general one position change every lesson?
With day and hour fixed, upper branches in lessons one and three advance one position; lessons two and four apply the mapping twice and advance two. The experiment makes this checkable.
Do two juan and seven physical volumes imply a catalogue error?
Juan can describe textual divisions while volumes describe bound units. They need not be equal. A complete contents and binding survey is needed to establish what each unit contains.
STUDY / Dà Liùrén
Deriving Liuren lessons and transmissions
- Materials and inputs
- Day stems-branches, monthly general, hour and transmission rules
Research question
Can the selection from lessons to transmissions be reproduced?
Practical exercise
Follow one named edition, logging candidates and reasons for exclusion. Preserve conventions for missing or repeated lessons and request an independent reconstruction.
Close readingThe Liuren earth plate: reading an incomplete objectStudy pathCosmic boards: objects and procedures03Evidence limits and research debates
Evidence limits and research debates
Distinguish traditional interpretations, documented material and claims requiring testing.
A Han board does not prove that the entire received system already existed. Transmission-selection rules are complex and vary in details by school.
This dossier supports historical, textual and methodological study. Internal traditional explanations are not modern empirical validation and do not replace medical, legal, financial or other professional advice.
04Core texts and materials
Core texts and materials
- 01Jingyou Liuren Shending Jing
- 02Liuren Daquan
- 03Liuren Zhinan
- 04Liuren Case Judgments