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The Day Master needs only a birth date. No time, no place.

What the Day Master is

BaZi writes a birth as four pillars: year, month, day and hour. Each pillar is a pair of a Heavenly Stem and an Earthly Branch, which makes eight characters (the literal meaning of bazi). The stem of the day pillar is the Day Master. It stands for you; the other seven characters describe what surrounds you.

The ten stems are the five elements, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, each in a Yang and a Yin form. Days run through them in an unbroken 60-day cycle that does not depend on the Sun, the Moon or the month, so the day pillar is plain calendar arithmetic. The rest of the chart is not: the year and month pillars turn on the solar terms, which is why BaZi’s year starts in early February, not on 1 January. More on the whole system in BaZi (Four Pillars) explained.

The ten Day Masters

Each stem has a traditional image. They are shorthand, not a personality test.

• Jia, Yang Wood: the tall tree. Grows straight up, slow to change direction, hard to bend.
• Yi, Yin Wood: the vine. Finds a way round, climbs whatever is near it.
• Bing, Yang Fire: the sun. Warms everything in range and is hard to hide.
• Ding, Yin Fire: the candle. A small, steady light, best close up.
• Wu, Yang Earth: the mountain. Holds still and takes a lot to move.
• Ji, Yin Earth: the garden soil. Takes in what is planted and grows it.
• Geng, Yang Metal: the axe. Blunt and decisive, made to cut.
• Xin, Yin Metal: the jewel. Refined and precise, marks easily.
• Ren, Yang Water: the river. Moves a lot and is hard to contain.
• Gui, Yin Water: the rain. Quiet, and gets in everywhere.

Not a Sun sign

The Western Sun is one placement among many. A Western chart reads the Moon, Mars or Saturn on their own terms and then looks at how they connect. BaZi does not. Every other character in the chart is read only by what it does to the Day Master, through the two cycles of the five elements: each element feeds one other and controls one other. That gives five relations.

• Companion: the same element as you: peers, siblings, rivals.
• Resource: the element that feeds you: support, learning, the people who back you.
• Output: the element you feed: what you make, say and show.
• Wealth: the element you control: money, and what you manage.
• Power: the element that controls you: rules, bosses, pressure, status.

The same element plays a different part in different charts. Fire is wealth to a Water Day Master, output to a Wood one and power to a Metal one. The published sample chart is a Gui (Yin Water) Day Master with Water 3, Wood 2, Fire 2, Metal 1 and Earth 0 across the eight characters: plenty of output and wealth, and no power element at all. A Western reader would start with what each placement means. A BaZi reader starts with what is missing.

Strong or weak

Two people with the same Day Master can read almost opposite, and the usual reason is strength. The biggest single weight is the month of birth, because each month belongs to a season and each season to an element: Wood in spring, Fire in summer, Metal in autumn, Water in winter, with Earth at the turn of each season. A Wood Day Master born in spring is in season. The same stem born in autumn, Metal’s season, is under pressure from the start.

Strength decides which elements help. A strong Day Master is helped by what drains or checks it; a weak one by what feeds or backs it. Schools weigh strength differently at the edges, and the Day Master alone is about as much of a chart as a Sun sign is. It is where a reading starts, not where it ends.

In a House Call reading BaZi answers one question, element and constitution, beside a Western and a Vedic chart. Where they agree the reading says so; where they do not, it shows all three. See why the charts disagree.

Common questions