Birth-Year Four Transformations

The Birth-Year Four Transformations are one set of transformations fixed by the heavenly stem of the year you were born (年干): Hua Lu, Hua Quan, Hua Ke, and Hua Ji, each landing on a main star. A person born in a 甲 year, for instance, gets Lian Zhen in Lu, Po Jun in Quan, Wu Qu in Ke, and Tai Yang in Ji — those four stars and the palaces they sit in are 'lit up' from the moment of birth and never change.

In Flying-Star, the birth-year set is the 体 (tǐ) — the substance, the unchanging tone you are born with — while the palace-stem flights covered later are the 用 (yòng), the situational mechanism. You always read substance first (birth-year), then function (flights).

In the Flying-Star register, each transformation has a distinct flavour. Learn these four words and you have learned the alphabet.

Because the Ji marks the one thing you truly care about and cannot put down — you 'forbid' it precisely because it matters. The palace holding your birth-year Ji is the heaviest, most energy-dense point of the whole chart; the fortune of everything else is often read relative to 'where the Ji is'. The first cut of a Flying-Star reading always lands on the birth-year Ji.

The maxim is blunt: 'Ji is the cause, Lu is the affinity, and the result lands where the Ji strikes.' The Ji names the cause, the Lu names the sweetness, and the palace the Ji opposes is often where the outcome settles. Grasp the birth-year Ji first and the whole causal chain has a starting point.

Both are Four Transformations, but they play different roles: one is the tone you are born with, the other a mechanism each palace fires. Layered together, they make the full chart.

Look up your birth-year heavenly stem in the ten-stem transformation table — the very same table the San He school uses (甲: Lian-Po-Wu-Yang; 乙: Ji-Liang-Zi-Yin; and so on). Only the reading differs: San He treats it as a fortune modifier, Flying-Star as a causal starting point to chase. The easy path is to cast a free chart, which marks where each of your birth-year Lu, Quan, Ke, and Ji lands.

The Qin-Tian four-transformation lineage takes the birth-year set as substance and palace-stem flights as function; the birth-year assignment follows the ten-stem table of 《紫微斗数全书》, while the Flying-Star line makes the birth-year Ji the first cause of every reading.