Tai Yi: Nine Palaces, Host and Guest in the Three Arts
Tai Yi is one of the Three Arts alongside Qi Men and Liu Ren. Its texts arrange named agents in palaces and compare host and guest calculations across dated charts.
The Three Arts
The preface names Tai Yi, Liu Ren and Qi Men as three distinct arts. Tai Yi’s contents organize seventy-two Yang layouts and seventy-two Yin layouts, then year, month, day and hour sections. These are separate chart scales.
Host and guest
The text names Tai Yi, Wen Chang, Ji Shen and Shi Ji, followed by host and guest counts and their major and assistant generals. Host and guest are positions in the chart’s comparison, not the twelve palaces of a Zi Wei natal chart.
Read a dated layout
Identify the chart scale, Yin or Yang arrangement and the named palace agents before comparing the host and guest counts. The terminology provides a route into the classical diagrams; the hour-chart task in Qi Men follows a different set of placements.