Ten Gods

Meaning

In BaZi the self is a single stem: the stem of the day pillar, the Day Master. Every other stem of the chart, the three that stand over the other pillars and the ones hidden in the four branches, is read by what it is to that self, and there are ten possibilities: the Ten Gods. “God” is the old word for a spirit or a force, not a deity to worship; the ten are relations, and they are the words in which BaZi says almost everything it says.

They answer two simple questions. First, how does the other stem’s phase meet the Day Master’s along the cycles of the five phases? It can be the same phase, the phase the Day Master produces, the phase it controls, the phase that controls it, or the phase that produces it: five families, the peers, output, wealth, power and resource. Second, do the two share their polarity, yin or yang, or not? Each family divides in two by that answer, and the five become ten.

The names carry the classics’ images. The peers are the Companion, “shoulder to shoulder”, and Rob Wealth; output is the Eating God and the Hurting Officer; wealth is Indirect Wealth and Direct Wealth; power is Seven Killings, also called the partial officer, and the Direct Officer; resource is the Indirect Resource and the Direct Resource. “Indirect” translates 偏, partial, for two stems of the same polarity, and “direct” 正, proper, for a yin and a yang that complete each other. Some of the names sound harsh; each describes a force, never a fate, and every one of the ten has its gifts.

In practice

• On the board every stem but the Day Master carries the name of its god, and so does every hidden stem, with its weight; the key groups them into their five families: peers, the same phase; output, what you produce; wealth, what you control; power, what controls you; resource, what produces you.
• Beside the board, “The Ten Gods” counts how often each stands in the chart, shown among the stems and hidden in the branches. Each god has a reading for when it shows, for when it lies only in the branches, and for when it is absent, which Ulune reads as a quality to find or to grow, never as a lack.
• The analysis reads them together: the peers and the resource support the Day Master, while output, wealth and power draw on it, which gives its strength and the phases that would balance it; the month’s god names the chart’s structure.
• The luck pillars and the years are read by the god of their stem: a decade of the Eating God, a year of the Direct Officer.
• Two people, in the Relationship lens: what each Day Master is to the other among the Ten Gods, and so which family the bond belongs to.

Across traditions

• In Japan the same ten, tsūhensei, “the stars of change”, are the heart of Shichū Suimei, the Japanese four pillars; Japan calls Seven Killings henkan, the partial officer, and the Direct Resource injū, the seal and its ribbon. Korea’s saju reads them as sipseong, Vietnam as thập thần.
• In Zi Wei Dou Shu, the other great Chinese art of the birth chart, the same matters are read through twelve palaces and their stars instead, with a palace for wealth, one for career and one for brothers and sisters, where BaZi reads them through the gods.
• In Western astrology a chart is also read from a centre, the Sun or the Ascendant, but its other factors are bodies and places in the sky; BaZi’s ten are pure relations of phase and polarity, a grammar rather than a cast of planets.

Origin and history

Reading a birth by its stems and branches is older than the Ten Gods. Under the Tang, Li Xuzhong, who died in 813, read a life from the year, the month and the day of birth, as Han Yu’s epitaph for him tells, with the year at the centre. The method that bears the name of Xu Ziping, at the start of the Song, moved the centre to the stem of the day and read every other stem by its relation to it; the Yuanhai Ziping, the Song book of that school compiled by Xu Sheng, sets out the ten names and their families, and Wan Minying’s San Ming Tong Hui gathers them again in the 16th century.

The relations rest on the two cycles of the five phases that Xiao Ji’s Wuxing Dayi, around 600, collected from the Han: Wood produces Fire, Fire Earth, Earth Metal, Metal Water and Water Wood; Wood controls Earth, Earth Water, Water Fire, Fire Metal and Metal Wood. The classics also read the gods as the six kin, the resource as the mother and wealth as the father, with the roles of spouse and children shared out by the two-gendered scheme of their time; Ulune reads the gods as qualities, and keeps to that.

Under the Qing, Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan built its structures on the god of the month and sorted the gods into four it calls favourable, to be supported, Wealth, the Officer, the Resource and the Eating God, and four forceful ones, to be tempered, Seven Killings, the Hurting Officer, the partial Resource and the Sword Edge. The Di Tian Sui, with Ren Tieqiao’s commentary, insists that any god helps or hinders only by the balance of the whole chart, and that is how Ulune reads them.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune finds a stem’s god from two things the engine knows of every stem, its phase and its polarity. It counts the steps from the Day Master’s phase to the other’s along the generating cycle, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water: none for the peers, one for output, two for wealth, three for power, four for resource. Then it looks whether the polarities agree: the same polarity gives the Companion, the Eating God, Indirect Wealth, Seven Killings and the Indirect Resource; the other gives Rob Wealth, the Hurting Officer, Direct Wealth, the Direct Officer and the Direct Resource. It does so for the stems of the year, the month and the hour, and for every hidden stem of the four branches, with its weight; the day’s own stem is the Day Master and has no god.

From there come the counts beside the board, shown and hidden; each god’s presence, shown as soon as one stands among the stems, hidden when it is only in the branches, absent otherwise; the structure, from the month branch; and the gods of every luck pillar, year, month and day, of their stem and of their branch’s main qi. In the Relationship lens each Day Master is taken as a stem of the other’s chart.

Correspondences