The Difference Between True Solar Time and Non-True Solar Time

This is a topic you can take very deep.

But the simplest difference between the two comes first:

Different systems each have their own parameters that they correspond to.

The ancients had no Greenwich Mean Time and no standard time zones.

In the East especially, people worked from true solar time, meaning the actual rising of the real sun. So for the most part, true solar time is the basis.

But if you have studied your own art of calculation (術數) deeply, and what it corresponds to is not true solar time, and you can explain why, and the logic holds together on its own terms, then that is something I can listen to and respect.

But a system that does not use true solar time will not be one founded by the ancients of the East.

That was the simple part.

Now a little deeper.

In Chinese metaphysics, what an art corresponds to affects the point it calculates.

It is not a question of whether it is accurate. It is a question of what it corresponds to.

Here is an example. Take Liu Yao (六爻). What it corresponds to is the mind.

Anyone who has placed the Shi and Ying lines (世應) knows this. To find the Shi line (世爻), you change the lines from the first line upward: a yang line becomes yin, a yin line becomes yang, until the inner and outer trigrams match. The inner trigram is one’s own mind. The outer trigram is the mind of heaven, the environment. Exchange your own mind for the mind of heaven, and the matter comes to be.

And the Shi line is that last key line where inner and outer become one.

So what Liu Yao corresponds to is one’s own mind and the mind of heaven.

And Bazi (八字)? Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗數)? Each of them corresponds to something different as well.