Classical Feng Shui - Taking note of bad days

WE ALL have our good and bad days. In this article, I will show you how to identify some very bad days.
The Year and Month Breaker are two of the most inauspicious of such days, and almost all date selection methods start by eliminating these two.
If you have read some of my earlier articles, you will know that each day is represented by a stem and branch (or Gan Zhi) pair.
You can easily find out the stem and branch for each day by referring to a 10,000-Year Calendar.
Each year is also represented by such a stem-branch pair. For example, 2016 is Bing Shen, Bing being the stem and Shen being the branch.
There are 12 branches in total, namely Zi, Chou, Yin, Mao, Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Xu and Hai.
Each of these branches also forms a conflicting relationship with its opposite. For example, Zi clashes with Wu, Chou with Wei, Yin with Shen, Mao with You, Chen with Xu, and Si with Hai.
A Year Breaker day is one where the branch of the day clashes with the branch of the year.
For 2016, its stem-branch pair of Bing Shen has its branch Shen clashing with Yin. Therefore, any Yin day (or any day where its branch is Yin) in 2016 is considered a Year Breaker day.
Next year, the stem-branch pair is Ding You. Since You clashes with Mao, therefore, any day with a Mao branch in 2017 is a Year Breaker day, which is considered highly inauspicious and cannot be used for any activity.
Now, each month is also represented by a stem-branch pair. For example, the first month in the Chinese lunar calendar in 2016 has the Geng Yin stem-branch.
Since Yin clashes with Mao, therefore, any day with the Mao branch in the Chinese first month in 2016 is called a Month Breaker day.
The stem-branch pair for the Chinese second month this year is Xin Mao. Since Mao clashes with You, therefore, any day with the You branch in the Chinese second month is a Month Breaker day.
Again, this day is considered very inauspicious and cannot be used for any activity.
There is also a Day Breaker. Unlike the Year and Month Breakers which refer to days that clashes with the year and month, the Day Breaker refers to the hour of the day, where the branch of the hour clashes with the branch of the day.
If you use the same logic for the Year and Month Breakers, you should be able to figure out what are the inauspicious Day Breakers.
Another inauspicious period that we should write off is the 4 Departure and 4 Extinct days.
The 4 Departure Days are the days just before the spring and autumn equinox and the summer and winter solstices.
The 4 Extinct Days, on the other hand, are the days just prior to the start of spring, summer, autumn and winter.
There are altogether eight such days in a year. The qi of the day is said to be stale and not good for any activity.
Yet another bad time is the Personal Clash day. These are days where the branch of the day clashes with the branch of your year of birth.
For example, if a person is born in the year of the Rooster, which has a You branch, then any day with a Mao branch (in any year or month) that clashes with You, is inauspicious for that person and should be avoided for any activity.
While the above dates are inauspicious for most activities, there are some specific inauspicious dates that are not good mainly for construction activities such as ground-breaking, knocking or tearing down of structures.
Examples include the yearly and monthly Three Killing days, which are again based on the clash between the branch of the day and the branch of the year and month.
So, while a day may be highly auspicious for most activities such as marriage, business signing or opening, it may not be suitable for carrying out renovation works or moving house.
And a day which is good for everyone else may not be good for you if it happens to be your Personal Clash day!
Henry Fong is an electronic engineer by qualification and he approaches feng shui with the same analytical and investigative approach he uses in his training. Readers can write to him at lifestyle.henryfong@thesundaily.com.