Ready Manual of Birth Star Rites 元辰章醮立成历

Author unknown.

Judging from its content, it was presumably compiled between the Tang and Song dynasties.

New Book of Tang · Bibliography records Yuan Chen Zhang in three volumes; General Records · Bibliographical Outline records Yuan Chen Zhang Yong in two volumes. Both are suspected to be this work.

Ready Manual of Birth Star Rites

The current edition is in two volumes, included in the Zhengyi Section of The Daozang.

This book deals with the arts of disaster appeasement and fortune-telling. The upper volume contains rituals for submitting petitions and offering sacrifices to avert disasters, including altar diagrams, four-door talismans for the Yuan Chen altar, ritual documents, and offering procedures. The lower volume contains methods for divining good and bad fortune and eliminating disasters. It lists the sixty Jiazi calendar and corresponding deity names. Based on one’s birth year, month, day and hour (i.e., the Eight Characters of Birth), and using the principles of the generation and restraint of the Heavenly Stems, Earthly Branches and Five Elements, it calculates impending misfortunes and their remedies.

For example, if one’s natal deity is the Jiazi God, and the calendar shows the inauspicious deity is the Gengchen God, one should invite the Bingyin God (the son deity) to eliminate evil, and the Jichou God (the harmonious deity) for protection.

In addition, this text records methods for averting disasters of the Five Tones, eliminating disasters of the Five Ghosts and Mortal Doom, comforting the Five Viscera, and seasonal invocations—all methods for divining disasters, eliminating calamities, and nurturing life.