The Five Phases, the Day Master and the Ten Gods in Bazi

Once a birth moment has been written as four pillars of stems and branches, the reading begins. Bazi interpretation rests on three ideas that build on one another: the five phases and their two cycles, the day master and its strength, and the ten gods, which describe every other character in the chart in relation to the day master. Each looks like a body of material to memorise. Each turns out to be a small, regular structure.

The five phases

五行, wu xing, is usually translated “five elements” and would be better rendered “five phases” or “five movements”. They are not substances. They are five positions in a pair of cycles, and the cycles are what carry the meaning.

The generating cycle: Wood feeds Fire, Fire makes ash and so Earth, Earth yields Metal, Metal gathers Water, Water grows Wood. The controlling cycle skips one: Wood breaks Earth, Earth dams Water, Water quenches Fire, Fire melts Metal, Metal cuts Wood.

Five phases and two rings, and every relation in Bazi is one step or two steps around one of them. If the phases are numbered in generating order, Wood generating Fire is “Wood plus one”, and Wood controlling Earth is “Wood plus two”. The ten gods, seasonal strength, the useful element and the unhelpful one are all arithmetic on a single ring of five. That is worth knowing even for a reader who never computes anything, because it means the system has no arbitrary tables of element relations hidden in it: everything follows from the ring.

The phases carry the seasons. Wood is spring, Fire summer, Metal autumn and Water winter. Earth is the turn between each of them, which is why the four Earth branches, 辰 戌 丑 未 (Dragon, Dog, Ox and Goat), sit at the end of each season rather than owning one of their own.

There is also a pairing of the phases with the five visible planets: Wood with Jupiter, Fire with Mars, Earth with Saturn, Metal with Venus and Water with Mercury. It is a genuine correspondence in Chinese cosmology, and the Chinese names of the planets still reflect it (Jupiter is the Wood Star, Mars the Fire Star). The version most Western readers have met, however, comes from E. J. Eitel’s Feng-Shui of 1873, where he describes the ten stems as arranged in five couples corresponding to both the five elements and the five planets. It plays little part in Bazi reading itself.

The ten stems by phase and polarity

Because everything is read relative to one stem, it helps to have the ten stems in view with their phase and polarity:

• 甲 Jia, yang Wood, and 乙 Yi, yin Wood
• 丙 Bing, yang Fire, and 丁 Ding, yin Fire
• 戊 Wu, yang Earth, and 己 Ji, yin Earth
• 庚 Geng, yang Metal, and 辛 Xin, yin Metal
• 壬 Ren, yang Water, and 癸 Gui, yin Water

Traditional descriptions give each stem an image: 甲 is the tall tree and 乙 the vine or grass, 丙 the sun and 丁 the lamp or candle, 戊 the mountain and 己 the field, 庚 the axe or raw ore and 辛 the jewel or fine blade, 壬 the ocean or great river and 癸 the rain or dew. These images are not decoration. They describe how the same phase behaves in its yang and yin forms, and they are used constantly in practice.

The day master

The stem of the day pillar is the day master, 日主, literally the day’s ruler. It stands for the person. Every other character in the chart is read as what it is to that stem, and changing the day master changes the meaning of every other character without changing any of them.

The first question asked of a day master is whether it is strong or weak, and the words are technical rather than evaluative. A strong day master has a great deal of support in the chart: its own phase repeated, and the phase that produces it. A weak one is surrounded by what spends it: what it produces, what it controls, and what controls it.

Neither condition is better. A strong day master is a lot of one thing that needs somewhere to go; a weak one is stretched and needs feeding. What each wants is the opposite of what the other wants, which is the whole reason the question is asked first.

The season and the five states

The month matters more than any other position, because the month is the season. Water in winter and Water in summer are not the same Water, however many times the character appears.

The classical scheme names five states a phase can be in relative to the season:

• 旺 prosperous: the phase of the season itself
• 相 strong: the phase the season produces
• 休 resting: the phase that produces the season
• 囚 trapped: the phase that controls the season
• 死 dead: the phase the season controls

In spring, then, Wood is prosperous, Fire strong, Water resting, Metal trapped and Earth dead. These are, once again, the five positions on the ring, read from the season’s point of view rather than the day master’s. A day master born in its own season starts with a great advantage; one born in the season that controls it starts with a great handicap, and the rest of the chart must make up the difference.

Roots and hidden stems

The four visible stems are only half the chart. Each branch carries one to three stems inside it, the 藏干 or hidden stems, and they matter as much as what is on the surface. 子 holds 癸 alone and 卯 holds 乙 alone, while 寅 holds 甲, 丙 and 戊, and 辰 holds 戊, 乙 and 癸. The main hidden stem of each branch carries the branch’s own phase; the others are lesser residues of the neighbouring seasons.

A day master finds its “root” in a branch that hides a stem of its own phase. A stem with a root in the month branch or the day branch is grounded; a stem with no root anywhere is said to float, and however often it appears on the surface it can be easily moved.

The useful element and the unhelpful one

From the verdict on strength follow the 用神, the useful element (often called the “useful god”), and the 忌神, the unhelpful one. A strong day master wants to be spent, so its useful elements are the draining ones: what it produces, what it controls, and what controls it. A weak day master wants to be fed, so its useful elements are its resource (the phase that produces it) and its own kind.

This is where the schools part company. The weights given to hidden stems, how much the season is worth, whether a root under the day master outranks two supporting stems elsewhere: practitioners disagree about all of it, in print. Some schools also recognise special structures, such as charts so overwhelmingly one-sided that the day master is said to “follow” the dominant force rather than resist it, and these reverse the ordinary rules. A verdict on strength delivered as a single word cannot be checked. A verdict that shows its reasoning, every contribution and what it was judged to be worth, can be weighed against what a student was taught.

The ten gods are a grid, not a list

十神, the ten gods, are the vocabulary of a Bazi reading, and they look like ten names to be memorised. They are better understood as the answers to two questions asked of every stem in the chart.

The first question: what does this stem’s phase do to the day master’s phase? On a ring of five there are exactly five possibilities. It is the same phase; it produces the day master; the day master produces it; the day master controls it; or it controls the day master.

The second question: do the two stems share polarity, both yang or both yin, or not? Two answers.

Five by two is ten, and that is the entire system. There is no eleventh god because there is no third question. Every name in the set labels one cell of the grid:

• Same phase: 比肩 Friend (same polarity) and 劫財 Rob Wealth (opposite polarity)
• The day master produces it: 食神 Eating God (same) and 傷官 Hurting Officer (opposite)
• The day master controls it: 偏財 Indirect Wealth (same) and 正財 Direct Wealth (opposite)
• It controls the day master: 七殺 Seven Killings, also called 偏官 (same), and 正官 Direct Officer (opposite)
• It produces the day master: 偏印 Indirect Resource (same) and 正印 Direct Resource (opposite)

For a 甲 day master (yang Wood), a 丙 stem (yang Fire) is the Eating God and a 丁 (yin Fire) the Hurting Officer; a 庚 (yang Metal) is Seven Killings and a 辛 (yin Metal) the Direct Officer.

Reading them as a grid makes the pairs make sense. 正官 and 七殺 are the same relation, something that controls the day master, and differ only in polarity. That is exactly why one reads as legitimate authority and discipline, and the other as raw pressure. 正財 and 偏財 are both what the day master can hold, one steadily and one in circulation. The same pattern holds for all five pairs: the “direct” or “proper” member, of opposite polarity, is the balanced form of the relation, and the “indirect” member, of the same polarity, is the more forceful or unconventional one. Once that is seen, the table is no longer needed.

Every god has a reverse

Each of the ten has a favourable and an unfavourable face, and a reading that gives only the first is closer to a flattering horoscope than to the tradition. 正印 is support and also dependence. 傷官 is originality and also the inability to leave an argument alone. 食神 is enjoyment and also indolence. 比肩 is self-reliance and also stubbornness; 七殺 is courage under pressure and also the pressure itself. The classical texts are notably less flattering than most modern summaries of them, and whether a god works for or against the person depends on whether its phase is useful or unhelpful to that particular day master.

The gods are also hidden. Each hidden stem inside a branch is a god to the day master too, and that is where much of the substance of a reading actually lives. A chart whose surface shows no Officer may still hold one inside the month branch, and an experienced reader will look there before saying the chart lacks it.