Direct Resource structure

Meaning

The Direct Resource structure is the frame of a chart whose month brings the Direct Resource, the phase that produces the Day Master, of the other polarity. Ulune’s reading puts it in a sentence: it frames a life around learning and care, knowledge received and passed on, patience, and protection given and found. The Resource is what feeds the self, as water feeds a tree: teachers, books, home, the people and places that make growth possible.

The tradition reads a mind that likes to understand before it acts: someone who learns readily, remembers what they were given and hands it on, and is often the one others come to for advice or shelter. Such a chart often has a feeling for study, for teaching, for the quiet kinds of authority that come from knowing things well.

Its difficulty is the comfort of being supported: much of the Resource can make waiting easier than doing, and study can take the place of trying. The classics like the Resource best with something to nourish, and Ulune reads the structure as a way of growing, never as protection promised.

In practice

• When Ulune names it: the month branch holds the Day Master’s Direct Resource and it comes first, shown among the stems before the month’s other hidden stems, or as the month’s main qi, peers aside, when nothing else shows.
• Its months, by main qi: Jia in Zi, Yi in Hai, Bing in Mao, Ding in Yin, Wu in Wei, Ji in Si, Geng in Chou or Wei, Xin in Chen or Xu, Ren in You, Gui in Shen.
• What the classics look for: the Direct Officer, which produces the Resource, a pairing the books call “Officer and Seal both complete”, learning given a place; or Seven Killings, whose pressure the Resource turns into support. When the Resource is plentiful and the self already strong, they like output, the Eating God or Hurting Officer, to give it an outlet. And they watch Wealth, which controls the Resource, study pushed aside for gain.
• With strength: the Resource feeds the Day Master, so a weak Day Master in this structure is helped by its own frame; a strong one, already well fed, looks for output to spend what it receives. Ulune shows the strength beside the structure.
• In time, a decade of the Direct Resource is one of support and learning, teachers, care and qualifications, as the luck pillars’ readings say: a time to receive and to grow.

Across traditions

• In Japan and Korea the structure is the injū-kaku of Shichū Suimei, named after the seal and its ribbon, and the jeongin-gyeok of saju.
• In Western astrology the closest theme is Jupiter and the ninth house, of teaching and higher learning, with the Moon for care received: knowledge and protection read from planets and places rather than from the month.

Origin and history

The classics often call the Resource 印綬, the seal of office and its ribbon, and the structure the seal structure: the emblem of the learning and standing that back a person. The Yuanhai Ziping of the Song names it among the standard frames, and the San Ming Tong Hui gathers the sayings that still guide its reading: the Officer produces the Seal, Wealth breaks the Seal, a heavy Seal wants an outlet. Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, counts the Resource among the four gods to be supported and teaches that the direct and the partial Resource are both fine frames when they serve the self; Xu Lewu’s commentary of 1936 carried that teaching into modern books.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune names the Direct Resource structure when, after the Prosperity and Sword Edge tests, the first of the month branch’s non-peer hidden stems to show among the stems of the year, month and hour is the Day Master’s Direct Resource, or, if none shows, when that stem is the first of them. The Direct Resource is the stem of the phase that produces the Day Master’s, of the other polarity: Gui for Jia, Ren for Yi, Yi for Bing, Jia for Ding, Ding for Wu, Bing for Ji, Ji for Geng, Wu for Xin, Xin for Ren and Geng for Gui.

Correspondences