The Romance Star Two Classical Tables Disagree On
BaZi has a star for romantic pull called 红艳. Modern pages hand you a lookup: ten day characters, a branch against each, find yours. What they rarely add is that the list they show you is not the list in the book they cite, and that the book which does carry it opens by doubting the whole class of stars it belongs to.
A Lookup With Nothing Behind It
《三命通会》, volume three, gives 红艳 a single line inside a catalogue chapter: 「甲乙逢午、丙寅、丁未、戊子、己辰、庚戌、辛酉、壬巳、癸申，为红艳煞。」 Ten day characters matched to branches, and nothing more.
No reason follows, and none is offered anywhere else in the book. An earlier volume of the same work gives 咸池 a chapter of its own and a stated origin in the cycle of the five phases. I will not open that star here; the comparison matters only as a measure of what 红艳 does not receive. A correspondence, and nothing behind it.
The Same Man Wrote a Different One
万民英 wrote 《三命通会》. He also wrote 《星学大成》, which carries a verse under a heading reserved for lookup verses. Its first four lines are the table again:
「多情多欲少人知，六丙逢寅辛见鸡。癸临申上丁见未，眉开眼笑乐嬉嬉。甲乙午申庚见戌……戊己怕辰壬怕子……」
Read the two against each other and three of the ten move.
- 戊 — the prose says 子; the verse says 辰.
- 壬 — the prose says 巳; the verse says 子.
- 乙 — the prose writes 甲乙逢午, which reads as both sharing 午; the verse writes 甲乙午申, which splits them, 甲 to 午 and 乙 to 申.
One author, two books, and no attempt anywhere to reconcile them. A third book, 《渊海子平》, keeps a shortened version of the same verse and takes the verse values.
Which Version Reaches You
Search the star in Chinese today and the table returned is 甲午、乙申、丙寅、丁未、戊辰、己辰、庚戌、辛酉、壬子、癸申 — the verse values, carrying the name 《三命通会》. The prose values, 戊子 and 壬巳, survive in the four-library editions of that book and appear almost nowhere else. The book cited and the numbers given are not the same source.
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A third table also circulates. It contradicts the verse set beside it and I have found nothing classical behind it, so I will not repeat its values here. AskingMing keeps the two documented readings side by side instead of collapsing them, so a 戊 or 壬 day is not quietly assigned a branch from a book that does not contain it.
The Chapter Opens by Doubting All of It
The chapter with 红艳 in it argues with itself at both ends. Its first line, in twenty characters: 「神煞，古有百二十名，其说穿凿支离，造化恐不如是。」 The old catalogues ran to a hundred and twenty names; their explanations are forced and fragmentary; creation is probably not like this.
He then says why he lists them anyway — 「兹以诸星家考验有理，复备叙于左」 — set down because various schools found them to hold up. That is inclusion, not endorsement. The closing line, in eight characters: 「吉凶神煞，不可拘定」, followed by an instruction to weigh them by adaptation.
One Warning, and Only One Addressee
The prose entry ends in five characters: 「女命最忌之。」 A woman’s chart has the most reason to fear it. Every judgment the three books attach to this star points the same way, and not one of them gives a male equivalent.
The verse adds 「世间只是众人妻」, and no classical commentator I can find explains whether that describes the woman carrying the star or the person she marries. Modern pages supply confident statements about female conduct before marriage. Those sentences appear in no classical text; they are recent, and they are not traditional.
The wording answers a question that no longer gets asked — whether a given woman was safe to marry. Treat the entry as evidence of what a Ming compiler was told to look for, not as a finding about anyone.
Seven of the Ten Still Hold
Strip the dispute and something usable is left. Seven of the ten day characters land on the same branch in both books:
- 甲午、丙寅、丁未、己辰、庚戌、辛酉、癸申 — agreed.
- 乙、戊、壬 — the three that move, and the reason the lookup is not settled.
The starting point is contested too. Where an instruction survives at all, one older manual reads the year character against the hour branch; modern practice reads the day character against all four branches. Both are documented, and which one you use changes the answer.
A star with a name, a verse, and two tables is still a star you can look up. AskingMing returns the seven agreed positions and marks the three contested ones rather than choosing for you, which is closer to what the chapter itself asks — hold these lightly, and weigh them.
