The Ten Gods: Saju as a Language of Relationships

Come in and take the chair nearest the lamp; the afternoon has gone gray and that corner holds its warmth the longest. The tea has sat long enough now to drink without hurting yourself. Last time we set the day master in the middle of the eight characters and left it standing there on its own. Today we ask one plain question about it: what is everything else in the chart to that single character?

That question has a name in saju. In Korean it is sipseong, which is usually given in English as the ten gods; the older books also say sipsin, and in Chinese-language BaZi writing you will meet the same set as the ten deities. I would ask you to take no fright from the word gods. Nothing here is being worshipped, and nothing here is watching you. These are ten names for the ways a character can stand in relation to the day master, and they exist for a homely reason. Eight characters are far easier to read as a household than as a list.

Five ways a thing can stand to you

Before there were ten there were five, and the five are the whole of it. Picture the day master as you, sitting in your own kitchen. Whatever comes through the door can only be one of five things to you.

It can be the same as you: another of your own element, a peer at the table. It can be something you make and put out, which is to say what you produce. It can be something you take in hand and manage. It can be something that manages you. It can be something that feeds and raises you.

That is the entire scheme of day master relationships. If you learned the five elements and their two cycles, the producing round and the controlling round, then you know this already and are only being handed new names for it. Same as me is bigyeop, the peers or parallels. What I produce is siksang, the output. What I control is jaeseong, usually rendered wealth. What controls me is gwanseong, the officer, or authority. What produces me is inseong, the resource or support.

Take a wood day master, since wood is the easiest to picture. Another wood standing beside it is a peer. Wood feeds fire, so fire is what this day master produces, its output. Wood takes earth in hand, so earth is what it manages, its wealth. Metal cuts wood, so metal is what governs it, the officer. Water raises wood, so water is what supports it, the resource. Nothing at all has been added to the five elements. The same five relations have simply been given household names, so that a person and not only an element can be read in them.

I find it useful to say the five as a day rather than as a diagram. You meet a friend and the two of you agree to build something; that is the peer position. You make the thing, using what you happen to know how to do, and that is output. The thing sells and something comes into the storeroom, which is wealth. Then come terms, and duties, and a name attached to you that you must now live up to, and that is the officer. And the name and the experience come back to you as standing and learning you can draw on next time, which is the resource. Five positions, one ordinary afternoon. They are not five kinds of people. They are five places in a turning that every person passes through many times over.

Five become ten, and polarity is the whole reason

Now the second half of the arithmetic, and it is only arithmetic. Every one of the ten heavenly stems is either yang or yin. So when a character meets your day master, it does not merely meet it as, let us say, wealth. It meets it as wealth of the opposite polarity or wealth of the same polarity as you. Five relations, two polarities apiece, ten names. That is where the ten in the ten gods comes from, and there is no more mystery in it than that.

Three of the five pairs are named by a tidy convention. 正, jeong, means upright or direct; 偏, pyeon, means leaning or indirect. Where the polarity is opposite to your day master, you get the direct member: jeongjae, direct wealth; jeonggwan, the direct officer; jeongin, direct resource. Where the polarity matches your own, you get the indirect member: pyeonjae, indirect wealth; pyeongwan, the indirect officer; pyeonin, indirect resource. The old reasoning is that opposite poles couple readily, so the relation runs orderly and continuous, while like poles push at one another, so the relation runs in surges.

The remaining two pairs kept older and more descriptive names from before that convention settled, and in those two it is the same-polarity member that runs the steadier of the two. Your own element at your own polarity is bigyeon, the shoulder-to-shoulder peer; your own element at the opposite polarity is geopjae, the rival peer. What you produce at your own polarity is siksin, the settled output; what you produce at the opposite polarity is sanggwan, the unruly one.

Let me set a marker here, because this is where the tidy-minded lose patience. The pattern does not run in the same direction across all five pairs, and the old books do not agree on why. I have read three explanations for it and I am not fully satisfied by any of them. What I would have you carry away instead is the smaller, sturdier fact underneath: every one of the ten is one of the five relations plus a polarity, and the polarity is what decides whether that relation tends to arrive at you evenly or in waves. That much is solid. It is enough to read with.

What each pair tends to look like in a life

Here is the part people actually sit down for, and the part where I will hedge more than you would like. These are tendencies noticed over a long time in many charts. They are not descriptions of you.

Peers, bigyeop. Bigyeon tends to read as independence, the willingness to carry your own weight, and ease in standing level with other people. Geopjae tends to be the competitive edge of that same thing: pushing, matching, an appetite for a contest. One of them steadies you and the other moves you. Both have a cost when there is a great deal of them, and the cost is usually that the table gets crowded.

Output, siksang. Siksin tends toward the settled kind of making: cooking, tending, a craft carried on for years, generosity that does not need to be noticed. Sanggwan tends toward expression that outruns the accepted form — sharp speech, invention, the impulse to do it differently than instructed. In my experience this is the pair people most often mistake in themselves, because from the inside both of them feel simply like wanting to make something.

Wealth, jaeseong. Jeongjae tends to describe a steady hand with what is actually in front of you: regular accounting, keeping what you have, a taste for things that last. Pyeonjae tends toward the wider and more irregular reach: several irons at once, opportunities noticed quickly, spending and giving on a larger scale. Neither word says anything whatever about how much a person has. They describe how someone tends to handle what passes through their hands.

Officer, gwanseong. Jeonggwan tends toward responsibility accepted in the ordinary way: rules one is content to keep, a position held properly, the wish to be thought reliable. Pyeongwan tends toward pressure of a heavier and less regular sort, along with the capacity to stand under it — decisiveness, and a willingness to take the hard assignment. The old texts also call this one chilsal, the seven killings, and I will come back to that name before we finish.

Resource, inseong. Jeongin tends toward orthodox learning and steady backing: schooling, documents, trust extended, patience to be taught in order. Pyeonin tends toward the sideways route to the same place — teaching yourself, unusual specialisms, long private thinking about something nobody assigned.

One more thing belongs here, about a relation that appears very little in a chart. Scarcity in the eight characters does not mean absence from the life. It tends to mean that this is the one that costs you rather more attention than it seems to cost other people. That is all it is. You can plane against the grain; it simply takes longer, and you ought to know that you are paying.

The relatives traditionally read in them

There is one further layer to the ten gods, and I hand it to you with a caution tied to it.

For a very long time these positions were read not only as kinds of activity but as the people standing around a person. The resource position, being what raises you, was read for parents. The peer position was read for siblings and close companions. Output was traditionally read for children, and the wealth and officer positions were read, along gendered lines that reflect the households those books were written in, for a spouse. Taken together, these are called yukchin, the six relations.

The caution is this, and I would rather be plain than polite about it. This is the oldest and loosest part of the system, and it is the part I see misused most. Someone reads that a harsh-sounding name occupies the position traditionally assigned to a parent or a spouse, and goes home and looks at a living person differently for it. That is a very bad trade. The chart never asked for it, and a name in a column has no authority over anybody in your house.

What the six relations can honestly offer is a description of how you tend to be inside a kind of closeness: where you give more than you meant to, what you find tiring in other people, which sort of tie you keep up and which sort you quietly postpone. Eight characters will not tell you who is good for you. They will tell you, fairly reliably, what you find costly. Take the second and leave the first where it lies.

There is no bad star among the ten

Some of these names sound violent, and I will not pretend otherwise. Geopjae carries a character for robbing. Sanggwan carries one for harming. Pyeongwan travels under that second title, the seven killings, which no amount of soft explanation makes gentle. I have had visitors sit in that chair gone pale over a word they read somewhere an hour before.

Those names were coined in a period that named things bluntly, by men describing the failure of a thing rather than the thing. Robbing wealth describes what unchecked competition can do at a crowded table; it does not describe a person who steals. Hurting officer describes speech that cuts across a rule, which is also the precise working method of a good critic, a reformer, and anyone who has ever made a room laugh. Seven killings describes weight, and weight is what makes people who can carry weight. A chisel is named for the fact that it cuts. No one calls it a bad tool on that account.

If you take nothing else from today, take this. Not one of the ten is a verdict and not one is a rank. The names describe the shape of a relation, never the worth of the person standing in it, and the same relation in two pairs of hands does two entirely different kinds of work — one turns sharp speech on whoever is across the table, and the other turns it into writing worth reading twice. The star does not settle the use. The person settles the use.

A chart is the vessel. Fortune is the water that comes into it, season by season. The ten gods are how we name what furniture is standing in that vessel and where it has been put, which is worth knowing before you decide how to live in the room. Knowing the layout will not make you a good householder. It does make it considerably harder to bark your shin on the same table in the dark for thirty years.

We will stop here. Next time is the last of these five sittings, and we will speak of the ten-year tides: how water comes to a vessel in long seasons, and what the language you learned today is for once it does. Between now and then, if you would like something small to carry out with you, notice over the next week or so which of the five positions your ordinary days are mostly spent in. Making. Managing. Being managed. Being taught. Standing level with people. Notice only, and do not conclude anything from it. Conclusions keep, and the last step in this was always yours.