San He School

Core Principles

The San He school derives its name from the Earthly Branch trine combinations: every three palaces spaced four positions apart (120 degrees) form a triangle. The Life Palace, Wealth Palace, and Career Palace form one such trine, revealing how personality, finances, and vocation interact. These triangles, together with each palace's opposite palace, form the analytical backbone of chart interpretation in Ziwei Doushu.

San Fang Si Zheng: The Four-Palace Framework

San Fang Si Zheng ("three directions and four positions") is the basic analytical unit of the San He school. For any palace you analyze, it combines four palaces: the subject palace itself, its opposite palace (180 degrees away, six positions across), and its two trine palaces (four positions away on each side, at 120 degrees). For the Life Palace, the opposite is the Travel Palace and the trine partners are the Wealth and Career Palaces, together the most important four-palace group in the chart. The subject palace weighs most, the opposite palace next, the trine palaces after that, but no reading is complete without all four.

San Fang Si Zheng Reference Table

How to Read San Fang Si Zheng

Step one: read the nature and brightness of the major stars in the subject palace to set the baseline. Step two: read how the opposite palace "reflects" in. It represents external feedback, and an empty subject palace borrows its stars entirely. Step three: check whether the two trine palaces support or undermine the subject. Reading a single palace in isolation misleads: a well-starred Life Palace surrounded by harsh stars across its three directions is a weaker structure than it first appears. This is what makes San He reading more dimensional than single-palace interpretation, and it is how the twelve palaces interconnect. To practice, plot your chart with the free Ziwei Doushu calculator and locate your Life Palace's four-palace group first.

Worked Example: A Life Palace in Zi

Suppose the Life Palace sits in the Zi branch with Wuqu and Tianfu. The reference table above gives its group: the opposite palace is the Travel Palace in Wu, and the trine partners are the Wealth Palace in Shen and the Career Palace in Chen. In this chart the Travel Palace holds Qisha, the Wealth Palace holds Lianzhen, and the Career Palace holds Ziwei with Tianxiang. Applying the three steps: the subject palace sets a steady, accumulation-minded, finance-savvy baseline; Qisha reflecting in from the opposite palace signals a competitive, fast-moving environment; the trine palaces bring leadership and institutional weight to career, plus sharp but volatile wealth instincts. Judged as a four-palace unit (steady core, charged exterior, strong support), this is an upper-middle structure suited to holding real authority through change, far more dimensional than reading "Wuqu and Tianfu in the Life Palace" alone.

San He vs. Fei Xing

The Fei Xing (Flying Stars) school emphasizes the dynamic movement of the Four Transformations across palaces, tracing energy flows and cause-effect chains. San He, by contrast, focuses on the inherent nature of stars within their palace positions and the structural patterns they form. San He tends to be more systematic and rule-based. Fei Xing tends to be more dynamic and flow-oriented. Neither is objectively better; they offer complementary perspectives.

Star Combinations in San He

One major strength of the San He school is its detailed catalog of star combination meanings. When the Ziwei Star appears with Tanlang Star in a palace, it carries a specific documented interpretation. Qisha with Pojun carries another. These combination rules, refined over centuries, provide consistent and reproducible readings that translate well into systematic analysis.

Why Fortune Cloud Uses San He

The San He school's structured approach, with clear rules for star interactions and palace relationships, aligns naturally with computational analysis. Each star combination has documented interpretive meanings that can be systematically applied for consistent readings. This makes San He a strong foundation for a platform delivering accurate BaZi and Ziwei Doushu analysis at scale. Fortune Cloud's online Ziwei Doushu calculator is built on San He rules.