Indirect Resource

Meaning

The Indirect Resource is a stem of the phase that produces the Day Master, with the same polarity: Ren for a Jia Day Master, since Water feeds Wood; Bing for a Wu, since Fire makes Earth. It belongs to resource, the family of what nourishes and supports the self, its learning, its protection, its roots; and of the two resource gods it is the unusual one, support that comes by a side road.

Its name, piānyìn, is “the partial seal”: the seal, 印, was the emblem of an official’s authority, and the resource gods take it as the image of what backs a person. Partial, in the classics’ sense, means one polarity on the same: a nourishment that leans one way, less the care that is given than the knowledge one finds for oneself. Ulune reads it as the Zi Ping school’s consensus does: unusual knowledge and intuition, a solitude that feeds, an independent mind. The tradition links it with the studies that stand to the side of the main road, and its caution is the hermit’s: with much of it, a mind can withdraw into its own sources and forget to share them.

Resource supports the Day Master, with the peers: for a weak self it is the help to look for first; for a strong one, more of it adds weight where an outlet would bring balance.

In practice

• On the board: for a Jia Day Master, a Ren stem among the pillars, or the Ren hidden in Hai and in Shen.
• Its reading: shown, intuition, unusual learning and an independent mind that finds its own sources; only in the branches, insight that comes in solitude, and knowledge you keep to yourself; absent, you may trust the evident over the hidden, and the tradition suggests time alone with an unusual subject.
• Strength: as resource, it counts for the support test among the stems, and a month whose main qi is the resource’s phase meets the season test.
• The structure: when the month’s structure comes from its Indirect Resource, revealed among the stems or as the month’s main qi, Ulune names the Indirect Resource structure (偏印格).
• Luck pillars and years: a decade of the Indirect Resource is one of insight, of unusual studies, solitude and intuition, a time to follow your own lines of research; a year, one of study, intuition and time alone that feeds you.
• Two people: when the other’s Day Master is your Indirect Resource, theirs produces yours: they support and nourish, you grow, a bond of care that runs mostly one way.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam it keeps its name: hen’in in Shichū Suimei, pyeonin in Korean saju, thiên ấn in Vietnamese.
• In Western astrology its themes are spread between Neptune’s intuition and the twelfth house, of retreat and the inner life: the same quiet sources, read by a planet and a house rather than by a relation of phases.

Origin and history

The Song dynasty Yuanhai Ziping names the two resources, the partial seal and the proper one, and the classics after it read resource as the mother among the six kin, and as learning, protection and rank. The Indirect Resource kept a second name with an image of its own: the owl, 梟神 xiāoshén. As resource of the same polarity it controls the Eating God, and the books call that meeting “the owl snatching the food”, an image of study or solitude crowding out ease and enjoyment, to be balanced rather than feared.

The Ziping Zhenquan, under the Qing, counts the partial resource among the four forceful gods, to be tempered, and names its remedy, the wealth that controls it, Indirect Wealth giving the solitary mind something in the world to work on. Its partnership with Seven Killings, which produces it, is one of the classics’ favourites: pressure turned into knowledge.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune names a stem the Indirect Resource when its phase is four steps from the Day Master’s along the generating cycle, the phase that produces the Day Master, and their polarities agree. It looks among the stems of the year, the month and the hour and among the hidden stems of the branches with their weights, counts the Indirect Resource shown and hidden, and reads it as shown, hidden or absent. Resource supports the Day Master in the strength tests, and the month gives the Indirect Resource structure when the Indirect Resource is the first of the month branch’s hidden stems, peers aside, to show among the stems, or, if none shows, the first of them.

Correspondences