Qizheng Siyu

What it is

This is a horoscopic astrology, which means charts are drawn and read for what they are held to say about a person or a moment. Practitioners count eleven lights. Seven are called regulators: the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets that can be seen without a telescope. The other four, the shadows or remainders, are not visible at all; their places are calculated from the positions and cycles of other bodies. All eleven together carry the name Eleven Luminaries. The system treats these bodies as signifying forces in a life, and its readings are a matter of belief rather than of measurement.

Where it comes from

The framework rests on very old Chinese sky watching. Names of stars that were later grouped into the twenty-eight mansions (xiu, star stations along the Moon's path) are inscribed on oracle bones dug up at Anyang, and the scheme was substantially fixed in the Shang period. A lacquered chest from a Hubei tomb, found in 1977, carries all twenty-eight names on its lid, so the set was already complete in the 5th century BCE. On this base Tang and Yuan dynasty practitioners added material from India, carried in by Buddhist texts, and from Persian and Islamic astrology arriving through Central Asian and Mongol-era contacts.

How it is done

A reading works from a birth moment: the eleven bodies are placed against the sky, and their positions are interpreted. Four of the eleven exist only on paper, being derived from fixed cycles or from the nodes where the Moon's path crosses the Sun's. The imported Indian astronomy that came with one eighth-century translation treated the Earth as a sphere, but that idea seems not to have entered the working technique of Chinese horoscopy. Judgement of the chart follows the conventions of the tradition rather than any single procedure.

What it is for

The purpose is horoscopic judgement: describing what the eleven luminaries are held to indicate at a given time, above all at a birth. Practitioners and their clients looked to it for forecasts and for understanding a life's shape. It was one branch of a wider Chinese fortune-telling culture that also included the twelve houses and other methods, and it sat alongside the official calendar work of the imperial court. What the chart is believed to show is a matter of doctrine, not of demonstration.

Who does it

In the Tang, foreign astrology of this type was handled by Buddhist and Daoist clerics, and East Syriac Christian scholars of the Li family, astronomers at the Tang court, are linked to compilations of the Yusi Jing and related texts. The monk Amoghavajra, who lived from 705 to 774, put Indian astral learning into Chinese through translations. Under the Ming the practice was common among literati, and handbooks such as the Xingxue dacheng by Wan Minying (1521 to 1603) show its currency. Later, Jesuit astronomers took charge of the imperial astronomical bureau from 1644.

Peoples and places

The system belongs to China, and it was formed by contact. Indian material came in through Buddhist channels, with the lunar nodes Rahu and Ketu joining the seven planets to make the Navagraha, the nine planets of Indian astrology. A Chinese version of an Indian treatise, the Jiuzhi li or Nine Seizers Canon, was made by Qutan Xida, an astronomer of Indian descent at the Tang court. Hellenistic and Persian methods arrived by way of Central Asian intermediaries, and Arabic texts reached China in the Yuan. The Ming court later saw translations of Arabic works.

What people believe

Behind the practice lies a view, shared with Indian and Hellenistic astrology, that the seven visible planets and the shadow bodies exert influence on events below. The seven are named through the Five Phases scheme of Chinese thought. Rahu and Ketu, two of the shadows, come from the Indian nine-planet set, while the remaining pair are virtual points fixed by calculation. Under the Yuan, the Mongol capital was reported by Marco Polo to hold about five thousand astrologers of Christian, Muslim and Chinese background, an indication of how many traditions of sky reading coexisted.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Bill M. Mak treats the Duli Yusi Jing, a Chinese reworking of Western astral material possibly from the tradition of Dorotheus of Sidon, as the key to seeing how Western sky science reached China through Central Asian and Persian go-betweens and shaped its horoscopy. Jeffrey Kotyk argues that much of Chinese horoscopy descends from Dorothean material carried by Indo-Iranian intermediaries, and that the translation became the base of East Asian horoscopy. Surveys of astronomical texts in the Chinese Buddhist canon support the picture of transmission, and Liu Liyuan has written on the Jesuit encounter with Chinese astrology.

Compare and confuse

It is one strand of Chinese astrology, distinct from Zi wei dou shu and from the older mansion-based sky lore it absorbed, and it is related to the Huihui Lifa, the Islamic astronomical system used at the Chinese court. The nine-luminaries scheme (jiu yao) in Chinese Buddhism is a narrower version of the same borrowing, and the Navagraha of India names the same seven planets with Rahu and Ketu. Indian naming, Chinese naming and translations give the system several English titles.

Questions people ask about Qizheng Siyu

Good reading and sources

• Qizheng Siyu on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data