Shen sha are the label layer of BaZi: each star is one rule plus one lookup table. This index splits the 36 stars into 13 anchor groups; every star has its own page with the complete table, a picker and school-difference notes. The scanner at the bottom reads a birth time and scans all 36 stars at once.
Tables cross-checked against external sources and against their own derivations; school differences flagged star by star.
Shen sha scanner
Enter a birth date and optional time. The engine builds the chart and scans all 36 stars, listing where each hit sits and which anchor produced it. Trine stars are checked against both the year and the day branch — both schools, no silent choice.
A note on what this page deliberately does not do: the popular versions of this material assign a fixed personality to each term — one character per branch, one destiny per stage. This site rejects that framing. What is published here is a structural position: which element sits where, on what kind of ground, with which tenants inside. The same term reads differently under a different month command, and no meaningful judgement exists without the other characters of the chart. Where the tradition offers a reading it is labelled as the tradition's; this site's own contribution is that every number and term on this page is computed, versioned and checkable against the methodology page.
FAQ
What are shen sha, and how do they relate to the five elements and ten gods?
Shen sha are empirical labels for recurring stem-branch combinations (the Traveling Horse, Peach Blossom, the Nobleman). They run in parallel with the five-elements/ten-gods language: one describes structure, the other named patterns. This site computes both from public rules; neither replaces the other.
Why do different sites give different lookup results for the same star?
Because the schools genuinely differ: the Geng/Xin rows of the Nobleman, whether yin stems get blades, the Yi-Chou/Ji-Chou variant of the Ten Evils — these are disagreements inside the classical corpus itself. This site prints both readings and flags the split instead of silently picking one.
When the scanner says a star is anchored by both year and day, what does that mean?
Trine stars (Traveling Horse, Peach Blossom, Canopy) can be anchored on the year branch or the day branch, and both schools have followings. When your year and day branches belong to the same trine group, one hit lights up from both anchors — marked as anchored by both the year and the day branch.
My chart has no auspicious stars and several unlucky ones — now what?
This site issues no verdicts and sells no remedies. A shen sha is a single tag; serious analysis returns to the whole chart. Treating one or two tags as a life sentence turns an empirical label into fatalism — the exact usage our methodology page refuses.
Reference index
Every enumerable component of ba zi has its own page here. Each page is computed by the same engine and can be checked item by item — none of it is a personality table.