子午流注 · zǐ wǔ liú zhù — flowing and pooling
子午流注

Chronoacupuncture

Qi and blood do not stand still, and the classical methods for following them are arithmetic before they are anything else. The stems open one point at a time across a sixty-day cycle; the Mysterious Turtle sums four numbers and divides by nine or six to name a palace of the Luo Shu, and the palace names a gate. These are not hard to understand — they are hard to calculate, which is why they were carried in mnemonic verse for six hundred years and why most practitioners never use them. That is the part a machine can simply do. The tables below are computed live and verified against the sources themselves.

納甲法Method of Adopting Stems

TdHoursChannelNaturePoint

靈龜八法The Eight Techniques of the Mysterious Turtle

Where the branch and stem methods run out, the turtle answers. Four numbers — the day's stem and branch, the hour's stem and branch — summed and divided by nine on a Yang day or six on a Yin day. The remainder names a palace of the Luo Shu, the palace names a trigram, and the trigram opens one of the eight confluent points.

飛騰八法The Eight Techniques of Soaring

The turtle's simpler cousin. Where Ling Gui Ba Fa sums four numbers, Fei Teng Ba Fa reads one — the stem of the hour — and reaches the same eight gates directly. It never closes: every period of every day has a point. Note that it assigns the trigrams differently from the turtle — Xu Feng's verse is headed 與前法不同, "differs from the preceding method" — so the same point may appear here under another figure.

納子法The branch clock

The plainest of the four, and the one that needs no calculation: each channel floods at a fixed double-hour. Reduce the one at flood at its child point; supplement the one just past flood at its mother point.

日課Plan a day

The calendar is fixed, so any day can be worked out exactly — thirty days ahead as readily as this morning. Pick a day to see its full round of twelve.

Hour At flood · reduce Open point Turtle gate

手册Carry it on paper

A hybrid: the engine computes, the paper travels. Print a run of days sized for a ring binder — openings on the left, a ruled line beside each period to note what you did.

醫案Practice diary

Record what you needled, when, and what followed. The hour's configuration is captured with each entry, so over time the record answers a question no textbook can: whether treating on time changes anything in your hands.

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The Five Transport Points 五輸穴

PointPhaseName

Four methods are implemented here. Nà Jiǎ Fǎ 納甲法 selects by the ten heavenly stems across the sixty-day cycle, opening one point at a time; half of every day is shut under it. Líng Guī Bā Fǎ 靈龜八法 reaches the eight confluent points of the extraordinary vessels through the Nine Palaces and the eight trigrams, and covers hours the stem method leaves closed. Fēi Téng Bā Fǎ 飛騰八法 reaches the same eight gates from the hour's stem alone, under its own assignment of the trigrams, and never closes. Nà Zǐ Fǎ 納子法 — the branch clock, below — needs no calculation at all: reduce the channel at flood using its child point, supplement the one just past flood using its mother point. All four are computed from the sexagenary calendar. The stem method's openings, the eight vessel-and-trigram pairings, and every substitution number in the Mysterious Turtle have been checked against the primary sources — Dou Hanqing's Zhenjing Zhinan of 1295 and Xu Feng's Zhenjiu Daquan of 1439. A study aid for practitioners — it does not replace your own examination.