The Day Master, the Character That Stands for You

Come in, and take the chair nearest the lamp. The light falls better on that side, and there is a little reading to do today. Last time we set the five elements out on the table and left the ten heavenly stems lying where we found them. Today we pick up one character only, and it is the one that stands for you.

Most people who sit in that chair arrive knowing their animal sign and assuming that is the character which means them. It is not. In saju, the Korean reading of the four pillars, which you will also meet under its Chinese name of BaZi, the self is taken from the upper character of the day pillar. That character has a name of its own. We call it the day master.

Finding the day master in your own chart

The finding of it is not difficult, and I would rather you did it once with your own hands than read three explanations of it. Put your birth date and your birth time into a ten thousand year calendar, the manseryeok, or into any of the four pillars calculators built on one, and four pillars come back to you: year, month, day, hour. Each pillar is two characters stacked one on the other. The upper character is a heavenly stem; the lower is an earthly branch. Find the pillar marked for the day, set your finger on its upper character, and you have your day master.

An example carries this further than a rule does. If the day pillar comes back as Gapja, the upper character is Gap, and Gap is the day master. If it comes back as Jeongyu, the day master is Jeong. If it comes back as Muo, the day master is Mu, and every other character in that chart will afterward be read by how it stands toward Mu. Whichever of the ten heavenly stems occupies that upper seat is yours. There are only ten of them, and one of them is on your page.

Three cautions about what you put in, since a wrong input yields a wrong character, and no amount of careful reading afterward repairs it.

The first is the hour. In the old reckoning a day is cut into twelve double-hours, and the first of them runs from eleven at night to one in the morning, which is to say it straddles midnight. Practitioners differ here, and they differ honestly. Some hold that the day turns over at eleven, when the new double-hour opens; others hold that it turns at midnight by the clock and treat the two halves of that double-hour as belonging to different days. I will not settle that for you, because it is not settled. What I would have you do instead is to know your hour of birth as exactly as you are able. Ask whoever remembers. Write down what they say rather than rounding it kindly. When the hour is firm, either method can be laid against it and the difference seen; when the hour is a guess, there is nothing to check.

The second is the calendar. Know whether the date you carry in your head is a solar one or a lunar one. A calculator will convert either without complaint, but only if it is told correctly which it has been given, and a lunar date entered as a solar one hands you a stranger's characters.

The third is smaller, and I raise it only because you will run into it. The clock a country keeps and the sun standing over the place you were born are not always in step. Korea sets its standard time by a meridian some way east of the peninsula, so the sun here runs a little behind the clock on the wall. Some practitioners correct for this before setting the pillars and some do not, and there are people worth listening to on both sides. It changes nothing for a birth in the middle of an hour. It matters only at the edges, which is another way of saying that it matters for the same people the midnight question matters for.

One distinction more, because keeping it straight now saves confusion later. The solar terms, those twenty-four seasonal divisions of the year, govern where the month pillar turns over, so a birth in the first week of February may belong to a different month pillar than the calendar month would suggest. The day pillar is not built that way. Days run in an unbroken cycle of sixty characters that has been counted forward without regard for seasons at all. Your day master does not move with the solar terms. It moves with the date, and at the margin with the hour.

The day master is not the day pillar

Two words sit close together here and are easily confused, so let me separate them while they are in front of us.

The day pillar is the whole column belonging to the day you were born, both characters together. In Gapja, the day pillar is Gapja entire. The upper character, the heavenly stem Gap, is the day master. The lower character, the earthly branch Ja, has its own name and its own uses, and we will come to those in time.

So the day master is the head of the day pillar, not the pillar itself. Only that head character is set up as the self. The rest of the day pillar is read around it, as the other three pillars are. When you see the two terms used side by side in a book, you now have the difference: one is the column, one is the character at the top of it.

Why the day, and not the year

You may reasonably ask why the day should be given this office, when the year is what everybody knows.

The older way did use the year. A person was read from the animal sign, and for a long stretch of the tradition that was simply how it was done. Then, something like a thousand years ago, a man remembered as Ziping reworked the method and moved the reference to the day. His reasoning was plain and I have never found a better one. The year is a character an entire household shares. Everyone born in the same twelve months carries it. The day belongs to far fewer people, and it is nearer to the person actually sitting in front of you. Move the self to the day, and a reading has some chance of describing this person rather than a whole cohort. The line of practice I was taught in begins at that decision.

There is a second reason, which comes from how the four pillars were divided up in the old books. Each pillar was given a domain and an image. The year pillar was called the root, and looked to ancestry and the ground a life was set in. The month pillar was the sprout, and looked to upbringing and the household one grew up inside. The day pillar was the flower, and stood for the person themselves and the one nearest to them. The hour pillar was the fruit, and looked to what comes later and what is left behind. The self, on that arrangement, belongs at the flower, in the middle of the four. So the day master sits where it does not by preference but because the whole structure was already pointing at that seat.

The ten heavenly stems, and the grain of each

Once the day master is found, the next thing to look at is the grain of that character, which is to say the direction it naturally splits along.

The ten heavenly stems divide neatly into five pairs, one pair for each element. 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. Within every pair the first named is the yang stem and the second the yin. In books written from the Chinese you will meet the same ten as jia, yi, bing, ding, wu, ji, geng, xin, ren, gui, in that order, which is worth knowing if you read across both traditions.

The old writers hung a picture from nature on each, and the pictures teach faster than the definitions do.

Gap is the standing tree, wood that grows upward and straight, with a forward habit and a liking for the first move. Eul is grass and vine, the same element turned pliant, going sideways along a wall and bending under weather rather than snapping in it.

Byeong is the sun in open sky, wide and even and hard to hide anything from. Jeong is lamplight and the coals in a brazier, a smaller fire, not showy, but the kind that keeps warmth in a room all night.

Mu is mountain and broad plain, earth that holds its shape and takes weight without much complaint. Gi is the tilled field, the earth that feeds things, closer in and more attentive, concerned with what is actually growing.

Gyeong is ore and unworked iron, metal before it has been to the forge, decisive at the join between one thing and the next. Sin is the finished blade and the cut stone, metal that has been worked fine, precise and careful of its edges.

Im is the wide river and the sea, water that moves in volume and turns things over as it goes. Gye is dew and springwater, water that soaks in quietly and arrives where the larger flow does not reach.

You will notice the pairs run the same element two ways. The same water is not the same in a river as in dew. The same fire behaves differently at noon than it does in a lamp. Yang stems tend to work outward and be visible about it; yin stems tend to work inward and finish quietly. Neither is the better one. They spend their strength in different directions, and each direction has its cost as well as its ease.

A starting point, not a label

Let me set a marker here, because this is the place where people go wrong, and it is a pleasant sort of wrong that does real harm anyway.

It has become a small entertainment to learn one's day master and read it as a personality verdict. I do not wish to spoil the fun, and I would rather people came to saju through enjoyment than through fear. But one character out of eight cannot carry a person. Two people both born under Gap wood are not two of the same thing. A tree standing in a spring wood and a tree standing on a winter plain live by quite different arrangements. The winter tree is glad of a stripe of sun; the tree under a full summer sky is glad of water instead. Same character at the head of the day pillar, opposite wants, and the difference comes from the season it stands in and the characters around it. Saying that this stem means this kind of person is like walking up to one tree and reporting on the forest.

A chart is the vessel; the years are the water that comes into it. The day master tells you something about the shape of the vessel, and nothing at all about what has been poured in lately or what will be. Eight characters will not hold a whole person, and I would not pretend otherwise. The grain shows, though, and grain is enough to work with. Knowing which way your own splits is worth having before you spend another decade planing against it and wondering why the same work costs you more than it seems to cost the person beside you.

So treat the day master as the point you mark on a map to show where you are standing. A map does not walk the road for you. It only tells you where the water runs and where the ground rises, so that you can choose your own steps knowing what they cost.

What to carry out with you

We will stop there for today. The tea has gone cold anyway, which is usually the signal.

If you would like something small to take with you, here it is. Go home and put your date and your hour into a ten thousand year calendar, find the upper character of the day pillar, and write that one character down somewhere you will come across it again. Then set the ten pictures beside it and see which one you have been handed. A standing tree, or a lamp, or a wide river, or the field after rain. Sit with it a while without trying to be right about it. Do not memorize it as an answer; keep it as an underdrawing, the sketch beneath the paint that has not been laid in yet.

Next time we take up the language of relation, the ten gods, which is simply the naming of how every other character in the chart stands toward the one you have just found. That is the step where a chart begins to speak in sentences instead of words.

What you make of your one character between now and then is not mine to decide. That last part never was.