Open Seat空亡

Open Seat comes from the gap left when ten stems are paired with twelve branches. While the stems go round once, two branches find no partner and are left over, and people of old saw those two as the vacant seats of that round. A character on an Open Seat was therefore said to be present on the surface yet unable to use its full strength. This service reads it as a seat whose theme takes time to fill out the way you hope, or a leaning toward ideas and values over visible results.

• 空vacant, hollow (Korean reading: gong)
• 亡gone, lost (Korean reading: mang)

Vacant and gone: the unfilled place of a character that found no partner in the round.

First find the Day Pillar's cycle of ten. A cycle is a run of ten stem-branch pairs opening with yang Wood, and the sixty pairs hold six such cycles. Only ten branches appear within one cycle, so the two left out are the Open Seat branches of that Day Pillar. They are marked in the year, month, or hour branch; the day branch is the reference. With no birth hour, only the year and month are checked.

Where an Open Seat falls, the reading turns toward process and meaning ahead of results you can hold. Tradition links the year or month branch to the background you grew up in, and the hour branch to plans you unfold later. Everyone has two Open Seat branches even if none shows; those characters simply did not enter the four pillars. Some readings see the open place as room for something new.

Take 戊午 (Wu Wu) year, 辛酉 (Xin You) month, 乙亥 (Yi Hai) day, and 癸未 (Gui Wei) hour. The Day Pillar 乙亥 falls in the 甲戌 (Jia Xu) cycle, whose Open Seat branches are 申 (Shen) and 酉 (You). The month branch 酉 is one of them.

• A common idea

  Everything tied to an Open Seat comes to nothing.

  How we read it

  The worry grew from the tradition that read such a seat as drained of strength. This service does not use it to mark results down; it takes it only as a seat that needs time to fill.

• A common idea

  Only special people have an Open Seat.

  How we read it

  Each of the sixty Day Pillars comes with two Open Seat branches. Whether one shows in your result depends only on whether those two entered the year, month, or hour branch.

This service takes the Open Seat from the Day Pillar only. Some readings also find one from the cycle of the Year Pillar, and some hold that the vacancy lifts when the branch meets a combination or a push. Open Seats from Luck Pillars or Annual Luck are not shown.