Chinese metaphysics is not one system but a family of them — a set of traditional arts, refined over millennia, for reading the patterns of time, place, and person. Classically they are grouped as the Five Arts (五术 wǔ shù): 命 (mìng, destiny), 卜 (bǔ, divination), 相 (xiàng, observation of form), 医 (yī, medicine), and 山 (shān, self-cultivation). At Butcher Boy we work the first three in depth, and this guide is the map to all of them — plain, unmystified, and honest about what each art can and cannot do.
If you are new to the subject, start here: understand how the arts divide, then follow the links into whichever one answers your question. Each has its own complete guide and, in most cases, a free tool to try.
The Five Arts (五术)
The Five Arts are a way of organising the whole field. Two of them — Medicine (中医, traditional Chinese medicine) and Cultivation (qigong, meditation, internal practice) — sit outside our work but complete the picture: the body and the spirit. The three we practise read destiny, answer questions, and observe form.
八字 · Four Pillars
Start with your own chart. Plot your Ba Zi free — exact solar-term accuracy, in your browser. The birth chart is where every reading begins.
>One Root, One Grammar
For all their differences, these arts are not a scattered collection of folk beliefs. They grow from a single root and share one grammar, which is why a practitioner can move between them. The root is the I Ching (易经 yì jīng), the oldest of the texts, whose image of a world in constant, patterned change underlies everything that came after. The grammar is yin and yang (阴阳 yīn yáng) and the five elements (五行 wǔ xíng) — wood, fire, earth, metal, and water in their cycles of generation and control. Learn to read the elements once and you can read them everywhere: in the stems and branches of a birth chart, in the trigrams of a hexagram, in the sectors of a home, in the proportions of a face. The arts were refined over centuries by working practitioners who tested them against life, kept what held, and passed it down as lineage rather than dogma.
命 — Destiny: The Birth-Chart Arts
The destiny arts read the pattern you were born with, from your exact birth moment. There are two great systems, and they are strongest together.
Ba Zi (八字 bāzì), the Four Pillars of Destiny, reads a life through the five elements and the Ten Gods — the balance and timing of a life, its weather. It is the foundation of the practice; begin at the Ba Zi guide and plot yours with the free calculator.
Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗数), Purple Star Astrology, maps the same birth moment onto twelve palaces of stars, reading life domain by domain in fine detail. See the Zi Wei Dou Shu guide and plot your chart with the Purple Star calculator.
卜 — Divination: The Question Arts
The divination arts do not read a whole life; they answer a specific question or choose a favourable moment, cast at the time of asking. Three sit here.
The I Ching (易经 yì jīng), the Book of Changes, is the root of them all — sixty-four hexagrams that model a situation and its tendency to change. Read the I Ching guide and cast a hexagram free.
Qi Men Dun Jia (奇门遁甲) is the strategist’s board — it reads the terrain around a decision for timing and direction. See the Qi Men Dun Jia guide.
Da Liu Ren (大六壬) is the most precise question art, building a board from the day and hour to read a matter’s outcome. See the Da Liu Ren guide. Together these three make up the 三式, the Three Cosmic Boards.
相 — Observation: The Arts of Form
The arts of form read what can be seen — a space, or a face.
Feng Shui (风水) arranges space so that qi flows well and supports the people in it, from the commanding position to the Bagua and the personal Kua directions. See the Feng Shui guide.
Face Reading (面相, Mian Xiang) reads the proportions and features of the face as a traditional map of temperament and timing, held lightly as reflection. See the face reading guide and try the face reading tool.
How the Arts Work Together
A skilled practitioner does not read a life through one art alone. Ba Zi and Zi Wei give the birth pattern; feng shui brings favourable elements into the spaces you live in; the I Ching, Qi Men, and Da Liu Ren answer the pointed questions and choose the moments; face reading adds what the present shows. The birth chart is almost always the right place to start — it is the ground the other arts build on.
Which Art Answers Your Question
The quickest way to choose is to name what you are asking. If the question is about a whole life — its shape, its strengths, the years that press and the years that open — you want a birth-chart art: Ba Zi first, and Zi Wei Dou Shu for finer detail domain by domain. If the question is specific and time-bound — should I take this offer, when is the right moment, will this matter resolve — you want a question art: the I Ching for a clear read of a situation, Qi Men Dun Jia for timing and direction, Da Liu Ren for precise outcome. If the question is about a place or a person in front of you, the arts of form apply: feng shui for a space, face reading for temperament and timing. When you are unsure, start with the birth chart; it grounds everything else.
What These Arts Are, and Are Not
It is worth being plain. These arts describe tendencies, weather, and timing — not fixed verdicts. A Ba Zi chart shows how you meet the world and which seasons run with or against your grain; it does not sentence you to an outcome. The birth chart itself is deterministic and can be computed exactly, but reading it is a craft of judgement, not a lookup — which is why two honest practitioners can weigh the same chart differently. None of these arts substitutes for medical, legal, or financial advice, and anyone promising certainty or guaranteed fortune for a fee has left the tradition behind. Held rightly, the Five Arts are instruments for clearer thinking under uncertainty — a way to see the grain of a situation and cut with it rather than against it.
Where to Begin
The most useful first step is to know your own chart. Plot your Ba Zi free, or read it in full — with luck pillars, a written reading, and your feng shui Kua directions — in the Butcher Boy app. From there, follow the art that answers your question. And when a decision carries real weight, a personal reading weighs the arts together. Cut through fate — clearly, and without fear.