What Your Ben Ming Year Actually Means
The year of your own animal, why tradition treats it as a difficult one, and what is actually recommended.
What does your Ben Ming year actually mean?
Your Ben Ming Nian (本命年) is the year of your own zodiac animal — it comes round every twelve years. Chinese tradition treats it as a year of friction, because your sign is said to be 'offending Tai Sui', the deity governing that year.
Your Ben Ming Nian (本命年) is the year of your own zodiac animal — it comes round every twelve years. Chinese tradition treats it as a year of friction, because your sign is said to be 'offending Tai Sui', the deity governing that year.
The practical advice is conservative rather than dramatic: wear red (which is why red underwear for your Ben Ming year is such a common gift), avoid starting major new ventures if you can defer them, and be more careful than usual about legal and medical decisions.
It is worth keeping in proportion. A Ben Ming year only affects one pillar of a full BaZi chart. For many people it passes unremarkably; for others it coincides with a luck-pillar change, and that combination is where the tradition's caution earns its keep.
Keep reading
See your four pillars
The calculator is free and lives on the reports page: enter your birth date, time and time zone and it builds the full chart. The written readings below it are optional — one payment each, yours to keep.
See the reports