How Da Liu Ren Lays Out the Four Lessons and Three Transmissions: A Path into One of the Three Styles
In my first week of learning Da Liu Ren I got stuck on one sentence: the Four Lessons hold a great deal of information.
I knew every character in it, but I could not see where the information was "held".
Only later did I understand: what I was looking at was four names sitting side by side, while in fact it is a chain.
What Is on a Liu Ren Chart
A Da Liu Ren chart is made up of several elements: Tai Sui (the stem and branch of the year in which the divination is cast), the divination hour, the monthly general, the void branches and so on (Source 1).
The monthly general comes from the position of the Sun among the twelve signs of the zodiac, and the benchmark for changing it is the medial term among the twenty-four solar terms; the void branches are arranged by the ten-day segment in which the day's stem and branch fall (Source 1). Of these two, one governs "the timing of heaven" and the other governs what "falls into the void".
The Four Lessons Are a Chain, Not Four Boxes
The Four Lessons are arranged as four groups, and each group has an upper and a lower spirit.
The key lies in this rule: the upper spirit of the first lesson becomes the lower spirit of the second lesson, and the upper spirit of the third lesson becomes the lower spirit of the fourth lesson (Source 1). In other words, the Four Lessons are derived layer by layer, each later lesson continuing the bloodline of the one before it, rather than being four independent positions.
I understand it as a path pushed outward from "oneself": the first lesson starts from you, the second extends one layer further out, and the third and fourth carry on from there. That is why the Four Lessons should be read in sequence; reading them out of order is the same as taking a chain apart into four separate pieces.
Why the Three Transmissions Divide into Nine
The Three Transmissions are arranged according to the generating, controlling and punishing relations between the upper and lower spirits of the Four Lessons. Traditionally the methods of arrangement are grouped into nine types, known as the Nine Gates: Zei Ke, Zhi Yi, She Hai, Yao Ke, Mao Xing, Bie Ze, Ba Zhuan, Fu Yin and Fan Yin (Source 1).
The Three Transmissions are divided into the first, middle and final transmission. The first transmission is also called the starting point, the initiating use or the useful element (Source 1) — which is the step discussed earlier, fixing the useful element before anything else: it decides where the reading of this cast begins.
Why nine types? Because under different controlling and punishing relations, which lesson to take as the starting point follows set rules. The Nine Gates are the list of those rules.
What to Read First as a Beginner
A senior practitioner once gave me a very practical line: do not be bewildered by the mass of detail in the books — first read such basic formulas as 《毕法赋》 (Bi Fa Fu) until they are familiar, look at plenty of case records, and work out how the judgments correspond to the chart pattern and the Four Lessons (Source 1).
I followed that for half a year. My biggest realisation was this: the difficulty of Liu Ren is not in arranging the chart, which is the program's job, but in picking out the one truly relevant line from the Four Lessons and Three Transmissions. Picking that line depends on accumulated cases, not on reciting formulas.
Tools on this site (for entertainment)
This site offers an entertainment-oriented process: describe your situation clearly → get a method suggestion → read the chart and the interpretation → export the result if you want to keep it. The content is for entertainment and self-reflection only; it promises no prediction and is not decision advice.
This article was last checked on 19 September 2026. Traditional divination has many schools and a long history, and their formulas and versions do not fully agree; the text relies on publicly verifiable sources, and for dates and calendars please refer to the latest official publication.
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Sources
- "Da Liu Ren" (《大六壬》) — Wikipedia entry: https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/大六壬 (accessed 19 September 2026)
- Method page on this site: Da Liu Ren: https://zhanbumizhi.top/en/methods/liuren (accessed 19 September 2026)