The Five Elements: The Materials a Chart Is Made Of

Come in and take the chair nearest the lamp. The afternoon has gone grey, and that corner holds the light longest. Last time we laid the eight characters of a saju on the table and looked at how they are arranged — four pillars, two characters apiece, and no more than that. Today we look at what those characters are made of.

Five materials. Wood, fire, earth, metal, water. The old books call them the five elements, or wu xing, and every one of your eight characters belongs to one of the five. That is the whole of today's business. Once you can say which material each character is, you can say what your chart holds a great deal of and what it holds little of, and that is the first useful thing a beginner in saju, or in BaZi as the Chinese tradition has it, can do without anyone's help.

The five materials, one at a time

Wood is the reaching material. Think of what a seedling does in April: it goes up, and it goes out, and it does both before anyone has told it where the fence is. A chart with a good deal of wood tends toward beginning things. Planning, proposing, starting what was not there last week.

Fire is the showing material. It is the noon light in July, which does nothing except make visible what was already standing in the room. Fire warms the space between people and puts the inside of a thing on its outside. It is expression more than heat.

Earth is the holding material. Earth belongs to no single season; it sits in the joints between them, in the weeks when one season is handing over to the next. Its work is to carry weight and keep the middle steady while the two sides argue. Charts heavy in earth tend to be the ones other people lean on without noticing they are leaning.

Metal is the finishing material. Autumn, the harvest, the blade that cuts the stem, the decision to stop growing a thing and store it instead. Metal ends, sorts, and says which is which. It has good judgment and short patience for muddle.

Water is the gathering material. Winter, and the water moving under the ground where you cannot see it. Water stores, considers, and remembers, and would generally rather think a thing through twice than say it once. It is the least visible of the five and often the busiest.

You will have noticed that four of them line up with seasons: wood in spring, fire in summer, metal in autumn, water in winter, with earth stitched into the turns between. That is worth carrying in your pocket, because the season you were born into gives one material the home advantage. Wood born in spring stands in its own weather. Wood born in autumn stands in the middle of metal's season and grows a different grain for it. Same material, different conditions. We can leave the finer version of that for another day.

Putting a name to each of the eight characters

Now the sorting itself, which is bookkeeping and nothing more.

The ten heavenly stems, the upper character of each pillar, run like this: gap and eul are wood; byeong and jeong are fire; mu and gi are earth; gyeong and sin are metal; im and gye are water. Two stems to each material, in the same order I gave you above.

The twelve earthly branches, the lower characters, are nearly as tidy. In and myo, the tiger and the rabbit, are wood. Sa and o, the snake and the horse, are fire. Sin and yu, the monkey and the rooster, are metal. Hae and ja, the pig and the rat, are water. That leaves four — jin, sul, chuk, and mi, which is to say the dragon, dog, ox, and goat — and all four of them are earth. They are the branches that sit at the close of each season, which is why earth is given them.

So if a pillar reads gap over ja, you have wood above and water below: one wood, one water. Do that eight times and you have your tally. Draw five boxes on a scrap of paper, label them, and put a mark in a box for each character you find. Most people who try it tell me it takes two minutes the first time and twenty seconds thereafter.

One habit is worth adopting while you count. Write the pillars out in their proper order, year and month and day and hour, rather than sorting them as you go, and keep the upper and lower characters in their own rows. A tally taken from a tidy chart can be checked a month later. A tally taken from a scramble cannot, and you will end up doing the whole of it again because you no longer quite trust the paper.

Two honest cautions before you trust that tally too far. The first is that a branch carries more than the one material on its face. There are hidden stems tucked inside each branch, and a careful reading counts those as well, which can turn a chart that looked empty of fire into a chart with fire kept in a cupboard. That is a later lesson, and a real one. The second is that the eight characters do not weigh the same. The branch of the birth month carries its season outright and sits heavier than the rest. Counting gives you the inventory. It does not yet give you the weight.

Eight characters sorted on a scrap of paper will not hold a whole person. The grain shows, though, and grain is enough to begin with.

The generating cycle, or how one material feeds the next

The five do not sit apart from one another. They pass things along, in a fixed order, and this passing along is called the generating cycle.

Wood feeds fire, as any wood does. Fire leaves ash, and ash becomes earth. Earth holds and yields up metal. Metal gathers water, and the old image for it is dew beading on a cold blade at dawn. Water raises wood, which is where we came in. Wood, fire, earth, metal, water, and round again. Each material spends itself a little in favor of the next, the way a household passes down what it has rather than keeping all of it in one room.

That is the generating cycle, and it is the easier of the two to like. Which is precisely why I want to slow down before the second one.

The controlling cycle, which shapes rather than harms

Let me set a marker here, because this is where beginners go wrong more often than anywhere else in their first month.

The second cycle is the controlling cycle. Wood parts earth, sending roots down through it. Earth banks water and holds it in one place. Water puts out fire. Fire softens metal into a shape a smith can use. Metal cuts wood.

Read that list quickly and it sounds like a list of injuries. It is not. Control is shaping, not harm. Wood that no blade ever touched does not become a beam, and water that no bank ever held never reaches the field. A chart made of feeding alone, with no shaping in it, has no structure to speak of; it produces and produces and finishes very little. The two cycles are not the good one and the bad one. They are the hand that grows a thing and the hand that trims it.

Feeding can be overdone in its turn. Water raises wood, certainly, but a seedling watered four times a day softens at the root instead of thriving. When one material pushes into another without pause, the receiving side more often slackens than strengthens. So put aside the arithmetic that says generating is always favorable and controlling always unfavorable. What you are looking at, when you look at a chart, is whether the current travels around the ring or pools in one place. It is standing water that goes bad, never moving water.

When one material runs long, and when one runs short

Now the part most people who sit in that chair came for. Count your eight and you will almost certainly not find them evenly spread. Even distribution is the exception. Far more common is a larder with sacks of rice to the ceiling and almost no salt, or a kitchen with plenty to cook and little to cook it over.

A material you hold a great deal of is a capacity you have had since you were small: the thing you do without being asked, the thing people come to you for. A material you hold little of is simply a kind of work that costs you more effort than it appears to cost other people. That is the whole of the information. This leaning is called an imbalance of the five elements, and I would rather you heard it as a shape than as a flaw, because a shape is all it is.

Here is how the various leanings tend to run, put in household terms.

A chart long in wood starts well and can leave its ends loose; a habit of finishing pairs with it usefully, and the reaching turns into fruit. A chart long in fire is warm and quick to light, and quick to go out again; one deliberately slow place in the week keeps that light burning longer. A chart heavy in earth is steady and dependable and can be slow to move; one window left open for new things suits it well. A chart strong in metal is clear and decisive and may read as severe to people who do not know it; a softening sentence takes nothing at all away from the decision. A chart deep in water thinks well and can keep too much of the thinking inside; a few more occasions to say the thing out loud will move that water along.

None of that is a warning. It is housekeeping.

Nor is any of it fixed in place. What the list describes is where effort has tended to go easily for a person of that make and where it has tended to cost more, which is a matter of habit and practice and company kept. It is not a matter of what you are permitted. I have known charts short in fire belonging to people who speak in front of rooms for a living, and they got there the ordinary way, by finding the cost and paying it on purpose.

I should tell you as well that the common saying — that a chart holding all five elements is a good chart — is only half right. An even chart tends to be capable across the board and blunt at the point, while a leaning chart is often carrying its leaning as its one sharp tool. So when you hear that it is a serious matter to lack such and such a material, you may safely decline to take it to heart. A short material can be borrowed the way a household borrows from a neighbor: through the people you keep near you, the work you agree to take on, the habits you build on purpose. Short on water, and you might make a place in the week for quiet and consideration where none existed before. Short on fire, and you might add one small occasion at a time to be seen. A long material needs no correcting whatever. It needs a use, and once it has one it is capital.

A chart is the bowl. What the years pour into it is read another way, and the same bowl serves differently depending on what is standing in it that season. The leaning of your five elements describes the shape of the bowl, and there is no such thing as a fine bowl and a poor one.

We will stop here for today. If you would like something to carry out with you: draw the five boxes, sort your eight characters into them, and then leave the paper alone for a week. Do not conclude anything from it yet. Notice only which box surprised you, the crowded one or the empty one, and why you had expected otherwise. Next time we take up the single character that stands for you in all of this, the one called the day master. What you make of your five boxes in the meantime is yours to decide. That part was never mine.