White Tiger白虎

White Tiger is the name of the sacred beast that guards the west. In the four pillars tradition it comes down under the longer name baekho daesal and was used for pillars whose force comes on as fiercely as a charging tiger. The name sounds heavy, yet what this service looks at is not events but the strength and direction of a force. It reads White Tiger as the drive to see a thing through once it starts moving, and the grit to hold firm in hard moments instead of giving way.

• 白white (Korean reading: baek)
• 虎tiger (Korean reading: ho)

White tiger: one of the four sacred guardians of the directions, the one that watches over the west.

White Tiger is judged by reading the stem and branch of a single pillar together. This service treats seven stem-branch pairs as White Tiger and marks any pillar, whether year, month, day, or hour, that matches one. Every one of the seven has an Earth branch: Dragon, Dog, Ox, or Goat. By the explanation handed down, if the sixty pairs are dealt in order into nine cells from the first pair, these land in the fifth, central cell.

Any pillar carrying White Tiger is examined as a place where that seat's force moves unusually hard. In the Day Pillar it points to your own drive and grit; elsewhere, tradition reads the force as running strong in the period or setting that pillar covers. A chart without it is not short on strength; none of the seven pairs came into its pillars. The stronger the force, the more it helps to decide where to aim it.

For a chart with 乙卯 (Yi Mao) as year, 乙酉 (Yi You) as month, 己未 (Ji Wei) as day, and 戊辰 (Wu Chen) as hour, White Tiger is marked on the hour pillar. Among pairs on the branch 辰 (Chen), only 甲辰 (Jia Chen) and 戊辰 qualify.

• A common idea

  White Tiger means suffering harm or heavy loss.

  How we read it

  The worry rests on old readings that linked the mark with being carried off by a tiger. This service does not treat it as advance notice of what your body or affairs might go through; it reads it as fierce drive.

• A common idea

  Commanding Star and White Tiger on one pillar double the roughness.

  How we read it

  Pillars carrying both names do exist, such as a Day Pillar of yang Water on the Dog branch. Even so, this service does not multiply their strength; it explains each meaning separately.

The seven pairs are handed down fairly consistently as 甲辰 (Jia Chen), 乙未 (Yi Wei), 丙戌 (Bing Xu), 丁丑 (Ding Chou), 戊辰 (Wu Chen), 壬戌 (Ren Xu), and 癸丑 (Gui Chou). Some readings weigh the Day Pillar most or count it alone, while this service treats all four pillars the same way.