刑冲合害

刑冲合害 is the collective name for the relations the earthly branches enter into with one another — punishment, clash, harmony, harm and the rest. This entry is the index for that group; each relation's pairs and lookup method live in its own entry.

Ziping Zhenquan's chapter on resolving punishment, clash, trinity and harmony (《子平真诠·论刑冲会合解法》) organises the field into four heads: punishment, clash, meeting and harmony, all of them relations of branch position. It glosses them by the number of branches involved and by the figure each suggests — branches opposite one another shoot across, three gathered branches are a company of friends, two adjacent branches are neighbours. Later practice added harm, break and hidden harmony to the four; those three are not in the chapter's list, and this site says so on each of their pages rather than implying a classical pedigree they do not have.

The chapter's operative principle is that punishment and clash are not desirable in a chart, and that a trinity or a harmony can resolve them by drawing one party away. It then supplies two exceptions — a resolution that leaves a punishment standing, and a harmony undone by a competing trinity — and one further move, accepting a clash in a secondary position to preserve the month branch.

Relations coexist. The same two branches can stand in more than one relation at once, and the engine reports each independently rather than letting one displace another.

Worked example. The example chart below carries three relations at once — 午 with 未 in harmony, 午 with 子 in clash, and 子 with 卯 in punishment — so 午 and 子 each sit in two of them.

Worked example (solar 1975-06-11 14:00, male, computed by this site's engine):

Pattern: 正印格 · Strength: 偏旺 (engine verdicts)