Choose the moment. The cosmos lays out its board —
and shows you where, and when, to act.
Nine palaces in the pattern of the Luo Shu, each loaded with a gate, a star, a deity, and its heaven-and-earth stems. A campaign table for reading the auspicious direction of any hour.
Legend says a turtle rose from the River Luo with a diagram on its shell — the 洛書, where every row, column, and diagonal sums to fifteen. That grid is the floor of the Qi Men board. South sits at the top, as on an old Chinese map; the centre is the pivot, its star 天禽 lodging in the Kūn palace.
Every direction on the board carries a gate. Three are auspicious — 開 休 生, the doors of opening, rest, and life. Face them; move through them. The others counsel patience.
The season sets the frame. From the winter solstice to 芒種 the board runs Yáng Dùn 陽遁; from the summer solstice to 大雪, Yīn Dùn 陰遁. Each of the twenty-four solar terms, split into three five-day yuán, fixes a jú number 局 — the seat where the earth-plate stems begin.
Six rites 六儀 — 戊己庚辛壬癸 — and three marvels 三奇 — 乙丙丁 — are laid into the palaces by the jú. The chief 甲 hides beneath a rite (遁甲, "escaping Jiǎ"); where its rite sits names the duty-star 值符 and duty-gate 值使 of the hour.
Then the heavens turn. The 值符 star rides to the palace of the hour's stem, carrying the whole star-disk with it; the 值使 gate steps round by the hours since the rite began; the deities wheel from the chief — forward in Yáng, backward in Yīn. The board that results is this exact hour's.
This board is cast by the 時家奇門 转盘 method — hour-based Qi Men, rotating-plate school. The day and hour pillars 干支 are computed exactly (Julian-day day-pillar, 五鼠遁 hour-stem); the 阴阳遁 & 局数 are read from approximate solar-term dates (±1 day near a boundary) with the yuán fixed by the 符頭 lead-day — the classic simplification, without the 拆補/置閏 leap-term correction. It is a faithful, well-structured plate for reading the shape of a moment, not an ephemeris.
Its rarer cousin is 大六壬 Dà Liù Rén — the "great six yang-waters," a heaven-plate-over-earth-plate oracle read from the hour and the position of the moon-general 月將. Where Qi Men is the strategist's map of space, Liu Ren is the diviner's clock of time; together with 太乙 Tài Yǐ they are the 三式, the Three Cosmic Boards.