The ten Day Masters

The Day Master is the heavenly stem of the day pillar, the sign a BaZi chart is read from. There are ten: five elements, each in a yang and a yin form. The pages below give the traditional image of each one, what supports it and what draws on it, and how the app reads its strength. Find yours with the calculator.

• Yang Wood — 甲 (jiǎ): The tradition pictures Yang Wood as a tall tree: a trunk that grows straight up, roots that hold the ground, a crown that gives shade.
• Yin Wood — 乙 (yǐ): Yin Wood is grass, a vine, a flowering plant: it bends in the wind and straightens again, climbs along a wall or a tree, and finds a way around a stone instead of through it.
• Yang Fire — 丙 (bǐng): Yang Fire is the sun: it shines on everyone without choosing, warms from a distance and cannot be hidden.
• Yin Fire — 丁 (dīng): Yin Fire is a candle, a lamp, a star in the night: a small flame that lights a room, not a landscape, and keeps burning as long as it has fuel.
• Yang Earth — 戊 (wù): Yang Earth is a mountain, a dam, a high dry plateau: it stays where it is, holds back water and shelters whatever grows on its slopes.
• Yin Earth — 己 (jǐ): Yin Earth is a field, garden soil, the earth that is worked and sown: it takes in rain, holds seeds and gives back a harvest.
• Yang Metal — 庚 (gēng): Yang Metal is raw ore, an axe, a sword before it is polished: hard, direct, made for cutting and for work.
• Yin Metal — 辛 (xīn): Yin Metal is a jewel, a fine blade, gold already worked: precise, refined, and aware of how it looks.
• Yang Water — 壬 (rén): Yang Water is the ocean, a great river: always moving, wide, carrying ships and silt alike, and impossible to hold in the hands.
• Yin Water — 癸 (guǐ): Yin Water is rain, dew, a spring in the rock: it falls softly, soaks in and reaches where a river cannot.

The descriptions are readings by the rules of the system, for reflection and planning, not statements about a person.