Almanac Auspiciousness Terms: Jianchu, Star Gods, and Lunar Mansions

A page of the traditional Chinese almanac carries several independent systems side by side: the twelve establishment spirits of Jianchu, the stellar deities governing the day, the twenty-eight lunar mansions, plus the Pengzu Hundred Taboos and the clash-and-evil-direction column. These systems run on their own cycles and do not adjudicate one another.

宜忌栏里的词是一套固定词表

The suitability and avoidance column is not an open field of editorial comment. It is drawn from a fixed vocabulary, and most of its entries are archaic terms with narrow technical senses. For example, 裁衣 in the old calendar does not mean making everyday clothing. It refers specifically to cutting garments for a wedding trousseau or preparing burial clothes. That is why the same term can appear under both marriage and funeral headings without contradiction: the word has two ritual applications, not the broad meaning a modern reader might assume.

The terms are best understood as labels attached to particular ritual or practical activities: offering sacrifice, groundbreaking, opening a granary, moving a stove, seeking medical treatment, taking up an official post, marriage, burial, and the like. Each label belongs to a traditional category of action, and the almanac marks it as suitable or unsuitable on a given day according to the particular tradition the compiler followed. The vocabulary is closed in the sense that it is inherited from earlier calendrical manuals; new activities do not enter the list freely, and old terms do not change their meaning to match modern usage.

祭祀、营建、婚嫁、丧葬：几类词的分野

The terms fall into recognizable groups. Sacrificial terms cover offering to ancestors or spirits, visiting tombs, and making vows. Construction terms cover breaking ground, raising beams, digging wells, building stoves, and repairing walls. Marriage terms cover betrothal, sending gifts, installing the bridal bed, and the wedding itself. Funeral terms cover washing and dressing the corpse, placing it in the coffin, sealing the coffin, burial, and secondary burial.

Some terms sit in more than one category because the underlying action is used in more than one rite. 裁衣 is the clearest case: it belongs to both marriage and funeral preparations. Another example is 安床, which can refer to setting up the bridal bed but also to moving a sick person's bed. A reader should not assume that a term's ordinary meaning exhausts its almanac sense. The categories are ritual categories first, practical categories second.

同一个词在不同通书里的写法

There is no single canonical text that fixes the wording of every entry. Different almanacs may write the same activity with different characters or with different levels of detail. One edition may say 嫁娶, another 结婚, another 纳采. One may write 动土, another 破土, another 起基. These are not necessarily contradictions; they are choices made by different compilers working within the same broad tradition. Some differences are regional. Some are matters of house style.

The same is true of the systems running alongside the suitability column. The Jianchu twelve spirits, the stellar deities, and the twenty-eight lunar mansions each have their own sequence and their own terms. The twelve spirits of the stellar deity column are 青龙，明堂，天刑，朱雀，金匮，天德，白虎，玉堂，天牢，玄武，司命, and 勾陈. Six of these are counted as yellow-road spirits and six as black-road spirits; the phrase yellow-road auspicious day comes from this division. A day marked auspicious by one system may be marked inauspicious by another. That is normal, not an error, because the systems have no common criterion. The suitability and avoidance column and the spirit columns come from different editorial traditions, and each compiler weighs them according to house rules.

查到一个陌生词该怎么办

First, identify which column the term appears in. The suitability and avoidance column uses one vocabulary; the stellar deity column uses another; the Jianchu column uses yet another. Do not try to interpret a stellar deity name as if it were an activity. 天牢, for example, is a stellar spirit, not a piece of advice about prison.

Second, look at the two-character structure of the term. Many entries are verb-object compounds: 开仓，问卜，安床，动土. The first character is an action, the second its object. If the term is unfamiliar, the object often gives the clue to the domain. If it concerns a part of a house, it is likely a construction term. If it concerns clothing, it may be a marriage or funeral term depending on context.

Third, consult the day's sexagenary characters rather than the term alone. The Pengzu Hundred Taboos attach one saying to each heavenly stem and one to each earthly branch. Every day therefore has two lines: for a day with stem 甲, the line is 甲不开仓; for a day with branch 子, the line is 子不问卜. These sayings took their present form in Ming and Qing dynasty almanacs. They are brief and mnemonic, and they are not to be read as universal moral rules but as calendrical tags.

Fourth, distinguish the clash column from the suitability column. The line 冲鼠煞北 has two parts. The first part, 冲鼠, names the zodiac animal that is clashed by the day's earthly branch according to the six clashes: 子 clashes with 午，丑 with 未, and so on. If the almanac says 冲鼠, the day's branch is 午. The second part, 煞北, gives the evil direction. The evil direction is determined by the three-harmony group of the day's branch: on 申，子, or 辰 days the evil is in the south; on 寅，午, or 戌 days it is in the north; on 巳，酉, or 丑 days it is in the east; on 亥，卯, or 未 days it is in the west.

Fifth, note the fetal spirit position if it appears. The position is assigned by the day's sexagenary pair in a sixty-day cycle. The first half of the entry names an object inside the house and the second half a direction outside it. On a 甲子 day, the fetal spirit occupies the area around the door and the pestle, in the southeast outside. This is a folk avoidance custom. It is not a medical instruction and does not replace prenatal care.

Finally, remember that 通书，黄历, and 农民历 refer to the same kind of almanac. In Cantonese-speaking regions the almanac is often called 通胜 because the word 书 sounds like the word 输, meaning to lose. That is a linguistic taboo, a substitution to avoid an inauspicious homophone. It has no bearing on the calendrical content. The underlying artifact is the same.

本站不发布每日宜忌

This site does not publish daily suitability and avoidance listings. What can be computed and verified is the sexagenary layer: the year, month, and day stem-branch values for any given day, and the exact times of the solar terms. That layer is astronomical and arithmetic. The suitability and avoidance layer is a calendrical convention, not a computation. Different almanacs differ, and the differences are part of the genre. This site explains how to read that layer, but it does not generate it.