图解易经象数学铁版神数

by 唐颐

人生就像一个解不开的谜题，对于未来，我们总存有难解的未知和不断的期许。如果你觉得好奇，有想要一探究竟的冲动，你不妨准备一个计算器，或者只是一管笔、一页纸，打开《图解易经象数学铁版神数》，沿着书中的脉胳，进行一次小学时就学会的加、减、乘、除四则运算，然后像查字典一样，找出对应的条文，利用铁版神数满足你发现未知的猎奇心。

铁版神数为宋代《易经》象数学派大师邵雍所创，以四柱八字为测算基准，将人生命运化入卦、数之中，是中国古代最高层次的预测学之一。在科技高度发达的今天，你或许认为铁版神数没有科学支撑，站不住脚，但你不能忽视它在历史上风靡一时的盛况，不能否认它是受誉最多的中国古代预测学说，更不可割断它与中国传统文化精华之间千丝万缕的联系！

打开《图解易经象数学铁版神数》时，或许只需你保持一颗纯真白勺好奇心，看看这门比四柱命理学更加精准的推命学说到底是怎样的，你便可能发现在简单数字背后掩藏着中华文化的一个“洞天府地”！

299 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Barack Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

598-Tieban shenshu-Shao Yong-Chinese metaphysical arts-1077

Barack
December 7, 2025


The *Tieban Shenshu*, also known as Tieban Shenshu, Tieban Suanming, Tieban Shensuan, or Taiji Shu, is a Chinese divination method. It involves using the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches of a person's birth date and time to determine their zodiac sign, comparing it to the zodiac signs of their parents, siblings, spouse, and children. The method uses an abacus to calculate the corresponding numbers, resulting in a sequence of numbers from which a prophecy is derived. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, a series of divination works were written, drawing upon mathematical principles from the *Huangji Jingshi*, but with modifications and derivations, and attributed to Shao Yong. It is said that Shao Yong, fearing his son's stupidity and inability to pass on his knowledge, created the *Chunzi Shu* (Stupid Son's Number) to pass on to his son. By simply following the method, one could predict a person's life, death, social status, and fortune. Later, after extensive revisions by Tie Daoren (also known as Tie Buzi), Shao Yong was still credited as the original author, while the author himself assumed the title of "collator," and the method became known as the *Tieban Shenshu*.

Tie Daoren (also known as Tie Buzi) based his work on the He Luo number sequence, the divination number sequence, the Five Elements and Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, Zi Wei Dou Shu, Zi Ping Ming Fa, the Seven Luminaries and Four Auxiliary Stars, and the phonetic method of Liu Sizu of the Qing Dynasty… and combined it with the number sequence of the Huangji Jingshi. Because *Tieban Shenshu* contains over a thousand pages of philosophical principles (arguably the most erudite work in the field of fortune-telling), and its content is extensive and complex, a significant difficulty lies in explaining the connections between the number sequences. Even today, few scholars have been able to study it in depth.

Based on the birth date and time (Bazi), this art form uses numerical calculations to derive article numbers and makes fortune-telling predictions according to ten categories, including parents, marriage, and wealth. It is particularly renowned for its accurate calculation of relatives ' zodiac signs. This art integrates knowledge from multiple systems, including the I Ching, the Hetu and Luoshu, Zi Ping Ba Zi, and Zi Wei Dou Shu. During the Qing Dynasty, Tie Bu Zi systematically organized its articles, incorporating the calendar and official titles, resulting in mainstream versions such as "Shenji Miaosuan Tiebanshu". Historical records show that the Tieban Shenshu articles are highly similar to the Ming Dynasty's "Huangji Fenjingshu", and most existing versions originate from the Daoguang period printing of the Qing Dynasty. Its schools are divided into the Southern and Northern schools. The Southern school uses the day stem and branch for calculation and has been transmitted to Hong Kong, while the Northern school focuses on the month stem and branch for calculation, but its lineage is almost extinct.

Shao Yong was born in 1012 in Henan Prefecture (present-day Luoyang, Henan Province) during the Northern Song Dynasty and died in 1077. He was a Neo-Confucian philosopher, mathematician, and poet of the Northern Song Dynasty, and is known as one of the "Five Masters of the Northern Song Dynasty" along with Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, Cheng Hao, and Cheng Yi. In 1026, he moved with his father to Gongcheng, Weizhou (present-day Huixian, Henan Province), and settled in Sumen Mountain. He was ambitious from a young age, studying diligently and traveling extensively throughout the country, including the Yellow River, Fen River, Huai River, and Han River basins, where he realized that "the Dao is here." In 1049, he settled in Luoyang and studied the *Hetu*, *Luoshu*, and the Eight Trigrams of Fuxi under Li Zhicai, achieving great mastery. He never held office. His works include *Huangji Jingshi*, *Guanwu Neiwai Pian*, *Xiantian Tu*, *Yuqiao Wendui*, *Yichuan Jijiang Ji*, and *Meihua Shi*.

Tie Buzi, little is known about his life.

Table of Contents
1. Heavenly Stems paired with trigrams
2. Earthly Branches and their corresponding trigrams
3. Tai Xuan Matching Number Formula
4. Earthly Branch Number Formula
5. Examples of adding the Eight Trigrams
6. Heavenly Stems paired with trigrams
7. Outline Song
8. Song of Different Fates Between Men and Women
9. Divination Formula
10. The key to determining the moment
11. The secret of determining the number of times
12. Number Selection Formula for the Day Master's Changing Hexagram
13. Formula for Determining the Numbers of the Four Pillars of Destiny
14. The Formula for Determining Numbers by Changing Hexagrams Before and After
15. The Formula for Determining the Major Luck Cycle
16. Annual Divination Formula
17. The Iron Plate Divination Method Reveals the Secrets

If we consider Chinese divination as a complete predictive system, its underlying logic can be understood as three mechanisms stacked layer by layer from bottom to top, each layer seemingly answering a more fundamental question. The most fundamental part is the model constructed by the ancients when attempting to abstract the order of the universe: from the Hetu and Luoshu to Yin and Yang and the Five Elements, and then to the Eight Trigrams and Six Lines. These structures are like an operating system, responsible for explaining how the universe operates and why all things change. But could a deeper question be hidden here: when the ancients drew the Hetu and Luoshu, what were they trying to describe? Was it the structure of the world, or humanity's way of understanding the world? The Hetu is a schematic diagram of the universe's skeleton, the Luoshu is like the rhythm of spacetime flow, while the Eight Trigrams and Six Lines break down natural changes into the smallest units of expression, as if the ancients used a "bit language" to capture repeatable and deducible patterns in the world. The second layer of logic is projecting this cosmic framework onto individual life, thus giving rise to the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, the Four Pillars of Destiny, the Na Jia system, and the Worldly Response system. Herein lies an intriguing question: why did the ancients believe that a person's birth time was sufficient to encode their life structure ? The Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, forming a sixty-year cycle of ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches, constitute the entire system's language of time; the Four Pillars of Destiny (Ba Zi) use year, month, day, and hour as coordinates to draw an energy structure diagram for each life; the Na Jia and Shi Ying systems act as interface protocols, connecting the Six Lines divination with the time coordinates, allowing the interaction between the individual and the outside world to be expressed. From a modern perspective, this system may not be predicting events themselves, but rather attempting to describe a person's tendencies, patterns, and reaction methods. The Eight Characters determine not the events themselves, but the attitude displayed in the face of events—is this perhaps closer to the essence of "fate" than predicting events themselves? The third layer of mechanism is the algorithm for extrapolating life's changes: the Major Luck Cycle, the Annual Luck Cycle, the Yuan Hui Yun Shi, and the Iron Plate Divination. Here, the question becomes more specific: given the individual structure, how can the future be predicted from it? The Major Luck Cycle (大运) is measured in ten-year periods, while the Annual Luck Cycle (流年) is measured in one-year periods. They describe environmental variables. If the Eight Characters (八字) are like player attributes, then the Major Luck Cycle and Annual Luck Cycle are like game levels; the winds and obstacles at different stages determine the challenges an individual will face in the world. The Yuan, Hui, Yun, and Shi (元会运世) are even more macroscopic, specific to civilizations and nations, and not applicable to specific individuals. It's like describing global climate change, with individual lives being merely small fluctuations. The uniqueness of the Tieban Shenshu (铁版神数) lies in its extreme specificity in this deduction. Its core feature is using formulas to correspond to the birth time, matching specific texts from a template library down to the year, event nature, and even details. Therefore, it predicts events at the event level, not trends. It doesn't say "a certain year's fortune is unfavorable," but rather "a certain month brings gossip and legal trouble due to documents," which is surprisingly direct. The Tieban Shenshu's origins are not singular but rather a synthesis of numerological traditions since the Song and Yuan dynasties, including elements of He Luo numerology, Four Pillars of Destiny (四柱八字), Six Lines Na Jia (六爻纳甲), and Qimen Dunjia (奇门遁甲). It can be seen as a product of the fusion of multiple systems. Its predictive scope covers major life events: marriage, illness, official position, migration, parents and family, children's relationships, career gains and losses, fortune and misfortune, and old age. What truly reflects behind these predictions may not be fatalism, but rather the ancients' impulse to structurally understand life: can life be written as a predictable function using numerical language? If a person's life is templated, does it mean that fate is merely the unfolding of a certain structure? When these divination systems are juxtaposed, they seem to be answering the same question that has spanned millennia: Does the universe have laws? Does life have a structure? Can the future be predicted? The more specific the text of the Iron Plate Divination, the clearer its underlying questions become: If events can truly be written, what can a person change? The events themselves, or the way they face them? Is this distinction precisely where the true philosophical value of the entire system lies?

The overall structure of Tieban Shenshu (Iron Plate Divination), if explained in a simple way, resembles an ancient coded query system using numbers as clues, hexagrams as the framework, and birth time as the key. Its core idea is not divination, but rather transforming birth time into a high-dimensional sequence, then subjecting this sequence to dozens of rounds of rules, repeated iterations, and transformations, ultimately locking onto a unique set of content in a database; once the numbers are fixed, the text is fixed—this is the origin of the name "Tieban" (Iron Plate). If we ask from this perspective, is traditional divination truly predictive, or is it using a structured method to map life onto a pre-written template? The first type of technique uses hexagrams as the main axis, responsible for converting time into hexagrams and numbers; it's like the "encoding layer" of the entire system. The most basic of these is the Bagua addition method, which continuously adds, rolls, and moduloes static time to obtain the destiny number; the Bagua has its own numerical values: Qian (☰) 1, Dui (☱) 2, Li (☲) 3, Zhen (☳) 4, Xun (☴) 5, Kan (☵) 6, Gen (☶) 7, Kun (☷) 8. Adding the year and month to the day yields the main hexagram; this algorithm is like extracting the underlying root numbers. Following this is the hexagram and stem-branch combination method, which maps the sixty-year cycle to the sixty-four hexagrams and three hundred and eighty-four lines. The heavenly stems are transformed into yin and yang attributes, and the earthly branches into symbolic positions, allowing the time coordinates to be translated into the language of the hexagrams, thus entering a calculable structure. The special feature of Tieban Shenshu is that it encodes fate with hexagrams, rather than using hexagrams for divination. Moving up further is the Taixuan number selection method, which elevates the six-line hexagrams to a three-dimensional eighty-one number system, originating from the Taixuan Jing. Three symbols constitute eighty-one images. First there are sixty-four hexagrams, then eighty-one numbers, and finally the fate is refined, as if expanding two-dimensional symbols into a three-dimensional model, making the description of fate much more precise. The fourth item is the time-based number selection method, which is that the ancients divided an hour into eight or twelve quarters, or even down to the minute and second. Each quarter is entered into calculations modulo eight, modulo sixty-four, and modulo ninety-nine. A difference of one minute in time may lead to completely different interpretations, thus forming the concept of "a difference of one minute, a difference of a thousand miles". The second type of technology primarily uses the Four Pillars of Destiny (Bazi) to convert the year, month, day, and hour into a coded sequence that can be further calculated. For example, the Four Pillars Heavenly Stem algorithm maps different Heavenly Stems to different values, then adds the four stems together to form a hexagram. Another example is the Day Master Hexagram, which treats the Day Pillar as one's natal chart and derives the main hexagram based on the generating and restraining relationships of Yin and Yang and the Five Elements, as if determining the most crucial "master key" in the entire system, from which all events are derived. Next is the Original Image Method, which divides destiny into two hexagrams: the Innate Hexagram symbolizes structure, nature, and constitution, while the Acquired Hexagram symbolizes environment, career, and outward expression. Only when the two hexagrams are combined can the text be read. Further, there is the Innate-Acquired Addition and Subtraction Method, used to determine the body system, such as different hexagrams corresponding to the heart, liver, and kidneys; moving lines represent acute illnesses, and changing lines represent chronic illnesses. There is also the Six Lines Stem-Branch Combination Method, which superimposes the mutual hexagram, changing hexagram, and stems and branches to obtain an extremely complex destiny number, used to predict marriage, illness, family structure, and major turning points. The calculation of the mutual hexagram is particularly crucial because it symbolizes midway changes in events and serves as a basis for judging the second stage of a career, turning points in marriage, and the major trends in middle age. In the numerical analysis of the preceding and following hexagrams, the initial intention of the preceding hexagram and the final outcome of the following hexagram are not aligned; otherwise, a "gap in expectations" will occur, such as gaining wealth and fame, or gaining fame but only through labor. The hexagram numerical analysis method goes a step further, breaking down a hexagram into multiple dimensions of information, including the main number, the number of lines, the yin and yang numbers, and the five elements attributes, and then recalculating, as if dismantling a static symbol into a multi-layered structure. The deeper levels of Tai Xuan numerical analysis are used to judge major illnesses, the success or failure of major undertakings, and turning points in fate; due to its complexity, traditional masters rarely use it entirely. The Eight Trigrams Rolling Method is like a dynamic calculation simulating life, predicting migration, change, and turning points through the rolling of hexagrams. The Four Gates Escape Method originates from Qimen Dunjia and falls within the Tieban system, used to judge direction, industry, migration, and auspiciousness or inauspiciousness in time and space, embedding the individual hexagram into the larger environment. The third type of technology is used for predicting cycles. For example, the Major Cycle Number Method converts a ten-year Major Cycle into a hexagram, and adds multiple layers of algorithms such as natal chart, Tai Xuan, and time to form the "Main Hexagram of the Major Cycle," which determines whether the theme of the ten-year period is dynamic or static, auspicious or inauspicious, and whether it is about migration or stability. The Annual Cycle Method is even more detailed, adding the Major Cycle Hexagram, the Main Hexagram, and the time number to the year, and then rolling it into numbers one through eight to form an annual event template to judge promotions, illnesses, marital changes, etc. The uniqueness of Tieban Shenshu lies here: it does not provide abstract good or bad fortune, but rather an event-based plot structure. At a higher level, there is the Yuanhui Fortune, used to judge the background of the times. This type of algorithm explains why some industries are generally depressed in certain eras, or why people with the same fate may take completely different paths in different eras. As for the last type, it is a fragmented algorithm pieced together from multiple traditional systems, including the Three-Three Cycle, Nine Cycles, Heluo Reform, Huangji, and Nine Palaces Flying Stars. Tieban Shenshu is not a single algorithm, but a group of compatible algorithms. However, no matter which combination is used, the ultimate goal is always the same: to map the sequence of life to a fixed database. If we take this as our endpoint and then ask again: Since all the clauses are derived from numbers, where do those numbers come from? Since the system is essentially a query template, does the "fixedness" of fate belong to the universe or to the algorithm?

The general principles of Tieban Shenshu (Iron Plate Divination) essentially establish the underlying rules for the entire system, explaining its operational logic, sorting methods, and core philosophy. Previous sections repeatedly emphasized several key concepts: destiny is divided into innate and acquired aspects; the hexagram is the essence, the technique is the application, "dwelling" is the fundamental nature of destiny, seeking good or bad fortune depends on hexagram changes, and detailed analysis relies on the time of day. Thus, the general principles first propose a fundamental stance: Tieban's understanding of "destiny" is not an adjective, but a sequence of numbers that can be calculated; the general principles themselves are not algorithms, yet they define the direction of all algorithms, as if saying that the essence of destiny is a mathematical structure. So how are these numbers derived? The first step is the Bagua (Eight Trigrams) addition method, which is also Tieban's most commonly used core algorithm. Its basic approach is to map the Heavenly Stems, Earthly Branches, and hexagram positions related to birth to the upper and lower trigrams, then look up the corresponding position in the Bagua addition