Luck pillars (daeun)

What the word names

Daeun is the name the four pillars tradition gives to a run of ten-year periods set out from a chart. It is filed on this site in English as luck pillars, and the characters written for it are 大運. The tradition sets each of these periods at ten years, so the run is a division into equal spans rather than a description of any one span.

The run is not looked up in a table. It is counted, and the count uses two things that are not among the eight characters of a chart itself: a direction, and a distance measured from the birth moment to a solar term.

The two things the count takes

The direction is settled by two facts read together: whether the upper character of the year column is a yang or a yin character, and the sex recorded for the person. In the tradition a yang year character with a man, and a yin year character with a woman, count forward to the solar term that comes after the birth; the remaining two pairings count back to the solar term that came before it.

The distance to that solar term is then measured in days and converted, with three days standing for one year. A direction, a distance to a solar term, that conversion, and ten years to each period: that is the whole of the arithmetic the tradition gives for setting the run out.

The form on this calculator takes a date, a time, a time zone, an optional longitude, and three settings for rules the calendar data does not decide. It does not ask for the second of those two facts: there is no field for sex.

What the result screen prints

This calculator does not set the run out. Under a chart the result screen prints four columns and eleven rows, and the rows name the calendar rules the calculation used and the values those rules produced. None of the eleven is a daeun period or an age.

So a term met in other writing on the subject has no row here to match it against. This page says so, rather than leaving a reader to hunt through the screen for a row that is not there.

Where this page stops

What is set down here is the arithmetic that lays the run out, and what this screen prints and does not print. Nothing is attached to any of the periods.

The tradition has a form in which each period carries a reading, and this site does not carry that form over. The rule for producing the run, and the fact that the run is not produced here, are left as they are.