Branch Six Destructions (Liu Po) — the Lightest Relation

Branch six breaks (六破) are the six pairs 子酉, 寅亥, 辰丑, 午卯, 申巳 and 戌未. A break is read as two branches undercutting each other's action, weaker in effect than a clash or a punishment, and it is rarely the sole basis of a reading. ⚠️ Schools do not fully agree on the membership of this list; the table here is engine-derived and states the six pairs the engine uses, and other listings differ.

On provenance this entry is deliberately thin. The full Ziping Zhenquan held on file does not contain a chapter on the breaks, and where it enumerates branch relations it names punishment, clash, trinity and harmony without including break among them. The lookup circulates as a mnemonic verse rather than through a citable chapter. This page therefore gives the pairs, states which listing it follows and why, and does not attribute verdicts about the breaks to a source it cannot show.

Worked example. The example chart below has 子 in the month and 酉 in the hour, one of the six break pairs.

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