The ancients wrote a set of operating systems in just eight words.
Before the official start
I suggest you do one thing first
Open your most commonly used large language model, Claude.
Opus 4.6 is also good, DeepSeek.
The latest model is also good
Send it your date of birth, date of birth, time of birth, and place of birth.
Let it help you arrange the horoscopes
Let's make a simple interpretation
It won't take two minutes
After reading the results
You might think it's accurate
You might think it's totally unreliable.
It doesn't matter.
But I guess there's a good chance you'll have a reaction.
That is.
How can it say something that makes me feel so similar?
With this feeling
Let's watch today's video again
Because today I'm not going to discuss whether the eight characters work or not
is it accurate?
That's another huge topic.
I only do one thing today
Put the underlying logical structure of eight-character numerology
I'll show you the whole thing.
After dismantling, you can decide
Is it a crude product of superstition?
It's a vastly underestimated set of ancient algorithms.
We start with the basics.
What is the eight characters?
The moment you were born
year
month
day
time
Each corresponds to a heavenly stem and an earthly branch
Together they're called columns.
Four units of time
Four columns.
Two words per column
Eight words in total
This is the full meaning of the birthday horoscope
Code the space-time coordinates of the moment you were born in eight Chinese characters
It sounds incredibly simple.
Okay?
How much information can eight words contain?
Don't jump to conclusions
Let me show you layer by layer
first floor
coding system
There are ten stems
A
B
C
Ding
E
self
Geng
Xin
Ren
Yeah.
There are twelve earthly branches, namely
child
ugly
C
Mao
Chen
Si
noon
not
apply
unitary
xu
hai
Ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches are paired according to the rules
How many combinations can be formed?
Your first reaction might be that ten times twelve is one hundred and twenty
But there are actually only sixty
Why is that?
Because the system imposes a hard constraint
The yang dry can only be matched with the yang branch.
Yin dry can only be matched with yin branch
A is Yang
gamete only
C
Chen
noon
apply
Xu these yang branches
B is yin.
Only ugly
Mao
Si
not
unitary
These yin branches
A simple parity rule
Cut the state space in half precisely
If you have written code
You will know that this technique is called pruning
Not all combinations make sense
Filter out invalid states with a rule
Make the system more efficient
These sixty stem and branch combinations form a cycle
It's called Sixty Jiazi.
Start with Jiazi
To the end of Guihai
Sixty Reincarnations
Then start over with Jiazi
The year pillar cycles in this sixty-year-old child
The sun pillar also circulates independently in Sixty Jiazi
But here's a design detail that a lot of people overlook.
The four pillars are not independent of each other
The earthly branch of the moon pillar follows the festival
Twelve months of a year correspond to twelve earthly branches
It's fixed.
But the stems of the moon pillars are not randomly assigned
It is derived from the year stem through a fixed formula called the five tigers fleeing the moon
Again.
The earth branch of the hour pillar is fixed corresponding to twelve hours
But the time is derived from the time of the day through the formula of the five rats
In other words
Knowing the year pillar, it locks the moon stem
Knowing that the sun pillar is locked
There are actually only two real free variables in the entire figure-eight system
Year and Sun Pillars
Do the math
Sixty kinds of columns
Multiply by sixty sun pillars
Multiply by twelve months
Multiply by twelve hours
That's about 520,000 different horoscopes.
520,000
Doesn't sound like much.
There are more than eight billion people in the world.
On average, each character corresponds to about 15,000 people
You might say
That's really rough.
Fifteen thousand people share the same life
Don't worry
This is just a static snapshot.
The eight-character dynamic system is not here yet.
After great luck and fleeting years are superimposed
Resolution will change qualitatively
We'll talk about that later.
But before entering the next level
Let me start by answering a question that many people ask
When counting eight characters
Don't you also need to provide the place of birth?
Is birthplace the fifth variable?
Here's the answer.
It doesn't count.
The only mission of the birthplace
Is a calibration column
It's CAPTCHA.
Not account info
And it's very simple.
China spans five time zones from east to west
But only one Beijing time.
The same clock points to two o'clock in the afternoon
In Shanghai
The sun is already in the west
In Urumqi
The sun was just overhead
The difference in true solar time between the two places is more than two hours
And the eight-character hour column corresponds to the actual position of the sun
It's not the number on your watch.
If you don't use the longitude of the place of birth to convert the clock time to true solar time
The hour column may be directly wrong by one or even two hours
The whole character has changed
All the deductions later are crooked
So the place of birth only participates in input preprocessing
Once the true solar time is determined
The time column is out
The mission of the birthplace is completed
The five elements at the back
Deity deduction
lucky year
Don't need it anymore
Throw it away when you use it once
Won't be credited to your account info
The design itself implied a very strong assumption
You taste it
Code for a person
Time is much more important than space
It's not that the ancients didn't know that the climate in the south and the north was different
Different soil and water
But when they designed the system
Select only time as the core encoding dimension
Space is just a calibration tool for time
Why is that?
I'll put this question here first
Rebate at the end
second floor
Five elements fine-state machine
Now let me ask you a question.
What do you think is gold, wood, water, fire and earth?
Most people blurt it out
Five elements
But think about it.
Wood can be burned to ashes
Ash can enter the soil
Is this talking about matter transformation?
Water can put out fire
Fire energy melting gold
If they were just five things
Why do you have to arrange a relationship between who and who?
There is no necessary chain of restraint between matter
But if you look at it from another angle
It makes sense.
The five elements are not five substances
They are five dynamic trends.
Wood represents hair growth
expansion
Fire is ascension.
release
Soil represents bearing capacity
Convert
Gold is convergence.
condensation
Water is sinking.
storage
They don't describe things.
It's the process.
And there are two sets of rules of interaction between these five states.
The first set is called Aioi
wood fire
fire soil
native gold
Jinshengshui
Aquatic wood
Five nodes end to end
Forming a positive closed loop
The second set is called Xiangke
wood clay
Tuke Water
Water and fire
fire gold
Jinkemu
Another closed loop
But skipped one square
The direction is also different
If you have studied computer or systems theory
You will recognize it immediately
This is a directed graph.
It's a control system with a feedback loop.
Five nodes
Ten directed edges
Two edge types
It's a positive feedback loop.
It's a negative feedback loop.
Together, they form a self-balancing system.
Any state is too strong
Will be conditioned by the state of it
Any state is too weak
Will be supplemented by the state of giving birth to it
This is not metaphysics.
It's a basic principle of cybernetics.
Negative feedback stabilization system
Positive feedback drives evolution
And ten heavenly stems
It's basically these five states, yin and yang.
A is yang wood
B is the shade wood.
C is Yang Fire
Ding is Yin Fire
V is sun soil
I am the earth
Geng is Yang Jin
Xin is Yin Jin
Noni is Yangshui
Gui is yin water
So the heavenly stems are not ten independent symbols
It's five states times two polarities.
Equals ten elementary particles
Yang is the rigid expression of this state
Yin is its soft expression
It's like water.
Renshui is a big river
Guishui is a spring of rain and dew
Essentially the same
Expression is completely different
OK
Here you may think the land branch is similar
The twelve earthly branches are not just twelve months
Twelve hours
No.
Earthly branches are much more complex than celestial stems
This is the most underrated design of the character-eight system
Third floor
Hidemarkan
composite particle
The interior of each branch
Not a single five elements attribute
Each branch hides one to three celestial stems
Called Zanggan
What does that mean?
For example
If the heavenly stalks were atoms
pure
Elementary particles of a single property
That earthbranch is the molecule.
It's made up of atoms in different proportions.
Take Yin as an example
The surface property of Yin is wood
But there is armor hidden in it
Bing fire
Pentu three dried days
Jiagu is natural gas
The most important attribute of Yin
The largest proportion
Binghuo is medium gas
Pentu is the residual air
The proportion decreases in sequence
So an in is not a purely wooden node.
It is a wood-based
A complex of fire and earth
The structure of each underground branch is different
Some only hide one sky stem
It's pure.
Xiangzi only hides Gui water
Maozhijiemu
Some hide two
Some hide three
This surface is a property
Design of multiple attributes nested internally
The complexity of the system has undergone a qualitative change
On the surface
A eight-character has four sky stems.
Four earthly branches
Eight words
But when you unfold all the hidden stems of the four earthly branches
The total number of active particles in the entire figure of eight skyrocketed from eight to
Twelve to sixteen
The relationship between these particles
gram
combine
rush
plus penalty
harm
broken
There are seven basic interaction types
It's a dense web of interactions.
And this network
This is the real battlefield of eight-character analysis
Fourth floor
system of ten gods
Everything is relative
If the first three layers are the physical layers of eight characters
The gods are its semantic layer.
It gives meaning to each particle in its own context.
The Design Philosophy of the Ten Gods
You may be stunned for a while
And it didn't remind me of metaphysics.
It was Einstein's theory of relativity.
There is an absolute reference point in the horoscope
The stem of your sun pillar
It's called the Japanese yen.
The relationship between all other heavenly stems and you
All are defined with reference to the Japanese Lord
The same five elements
The meaning is completely different for different Japanese owners
For example, your Japanese master is Jiagu
Another parchment appeared
Same thing as you.
Shoulder-to-shoulder
peer competitor
Gengjin appeared
Jinkemu
It restrains you.
Seven Kills
A tough pressure and challenge
But what if your Japanese owner is replaced by nonshui?
The same Gengjin
Jinshengshui
It becomes giving birth to you
Build your strength
It's called offset printing.
It's resources and support.
You stop for a second
Feel the flip.
The same Gengjin
Not a word has changed
Just because the reference point has changed
It went from killing you to feeding you
There are no absolute good five elements
There are no absolute bad five elements
It all depends on who you compare to
The ten-god system uses ten labels
shoulder to shoulder
robbery
God of Cookery
wounded officer
partial wealth
Zhengcai
bias printing
main print
Seven kills
official
Exhausted all possible relationship types
These ten relationships
It's from Japan
The Complete Set Derived Along the Shengke System of the Five Elements
And that means Character is fundamentally not a system of what you have.
It's a system of what's in relation to what.
It's relational.
relative
It's not physical.
absolute
This design philosophy
It's more precise than most people think
More than one dimension
Fifth floor
Good luck and fleeting years
Injection of time
Your horoscope is a snapshot of the moment of birth
Once determined
Unchanged for life
But the human condition is obviously always changing
Twenty-year-old and fifty-year-old people with the same figure of eight are in completely different states
How to explain this
The answer is good luck and fleeting years
The great luck is deduced from the moon pillar
A step change every ten years
Each step is a new combination of stem and branch
This new stem branch is injected into your fixed horoscope
Have a new relationship with the original eight characters
Your horoscope is the main board
The great luck is to insert a new expansion card every ten years
Of course the behavior of the system changes
Fleeting years are finer
Every year, the branches circulating between heaven and earth will also be injected into your system
Great luck is the base color of the decade
Fleeting years are the specific variables of each year
The two are superimposed on top of your figure eight
It's a three-tier nested dynamic system.
The bottom layer is a fixed birth figure
The middle level is a good luck that changes every ten years
The surface is the fleeting year that changes every year
And it also has to do with gender.
The same eight characters
Men's and women's fortunes start at different times
It could be going in the opposite direction.
This rule doubles the resolution again
I just said that 520,000 kinds of static eight characters are too rough
Now add the dynamic evolution of great luck and fleeting years
The same eight characters take on completely different faces at different stages of life
The actual resolution of the system is far more than 520,000
Now.
So let's take a step back.
You get a complete view of the system.
bottom layer
Yin and Yang
binary
One floor up
Yin and yang give rise to the five elements
Five-state closed-loop control system
Further up.
Five elements multiplied by yin and yang
Generate ten days dry
Ten elementary particles
The sky stem is nested into the ground branch according to the proportion
Twelve composite particles
Space-time coordinates of the moment of birth encoded by four columns
The ten-god system takes the Japanese Lord as the reference point
Transform all particles into a network of relationships
Great luck and fleeting years provide dynamic input in time dimension
simple rule
layer upon layer
combination explosion
Astronomical complexity emerges
And you know what that reminds me of?
Cellular automata studied by Wolfram
His team proved that one-dimensional
A cellular automaton with only two states
All it takes is a few minimal rules
We can generate a Turing-complete computing system.
And the underlying rules of the figure of eight are much more complex than cellular automata
Five states
Types of interactions
multi-layer nested structure
And the combinatorial space is astronomical.
The underlying coding of this system
stem branch
It was born over 2,000 years ago.
And its complete structure was finally finalized in the Tang and Song Dynasties
There were no computers.
No set theory.
No graph theory
How did the ancients design it?
Or are they not designing?
It's discovery.
I didn't say the eight characters in the whole process today.
I deliberately kept this question untouched.
But I want to leave you with two more fundamental questions.
The first one.
Remember that question I buried earlier?
Why did the ancients only use time codes?
No space required.
People born at the same time
One is at minus 30 degrees in Mohe
One is thirty-five degrees in Hainan Island
climate
property
It's completely different.
But the eight characters are exactly the same
The ancients were not stupid
They know, of course, that the north-south divide is enormous.
But they chose to only encode time.
You think about your own experience.
You moved house?
Changed cities
Maybe even changed countries
Space is always changing
But you are still you
And that change between your 20s and 40s
It happened without moving.
The ancients may have seen this
In their cognitive framework
A person's fate is based on color, not where you are
But when are you
Information density carried by time
They see it as far above space.
Is this judgment correct?
I don't know.
But the judgment itself
That's an incredibly bold low-level cognitive proposition.
Second
Why did the ancients use such a sophisticated formal system to
Coded moment of birth
If they're just superstitious
Just fool it
Why build a logically consistent system?
layer by layer
And there's dynamic evolution.
What did they observe?
To think that the time state of a person at the moment of birth
Contains some kind of information about this person's life
What is this message exactly?
In what form does it exist?
Why is it possible that it corresponds somehow to a person's trajectory?
These questions.
That's the deepwater area that's really worth asking about.
What do you think?
You think horoscopes are just a set of elaborate but useless ancient math games
Or maybe it really touches on some kind of pattern that we don't yet understand
Have you been counted particularly accurately?
Or a particularly outrageous experience
Welcome to chat with your thoughts in the comment area.
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.