What the Ten Gods Stand For

Translator's note. A reference page, and the one to keep open while reading the rest. Two departures from convention: the ten gods are not split into “direct” and “indirect” versions (you cannot tell which yuan of your income was direct wealth and which indirect), but the parallel and the rob are split. Then the same five gods are re-read for each kind of question — wealth, career, illness, lawsuits, prison, marriage — because a ten god means nothing until you know what is being asked.

Every ten god has a fundamental meaning. But many who write bazi books, in order to show off and mystify, make the meanings extremely complicated, so that students cannot grasp the essence. Assign ten thousand meanings to the ten gods and there is no way to choose among them when reading.

1. Not dividing the ten gods into direct and indirect is the foundation of fate studies

In our system: (1) the ten gods are not divided into direct and indirect. (2) The parallel and the rob must be discussed separately. In the branches there is no parallel: a branch of the same element as the day master is treated only as rob.

In real life direct wealth and indirect wealth cannot in fact be separated. Do you know which of the money you earned was direct wealth and which was indirect? What matters is whether you have wealth at all. For a man the wealth star is the wife; what matters is whether he has a wife. For the officer-and-killer, what matters is whether you hold real power. For the seal, what matters is whether you have the culture and cultivation the seal stands for — not a piece of paper. Of China's top scientists, very few graduated from Tsinghua or Peking University. As for the seal, many stepmothers are better than real mothers. In real life many people's stepfather is their mother's lover, and the mother's lover is generally superior to the real father: the real father cannot buy you a flat in Beijing, the stepfather puts down several million for the deposit. The ancient division of the ten gods into direct and indirect rests on a theory of ethics, not on fact.

2. The essential meaning of each ten god

Officer-and-killer. To a government official it means power. To a non-official it means career. To any person it means superiors, benefactors, petty people — and disaster. To a woman it means the husband. To a team it means the establishment of rules and institutions.

Wealth star. Money. Ability. Reasons of every kind. To a man, wife and lover.

Eating-and-wounding. The source of wealth. Ideals and goals. Intelligence. Children. Assistants and subordinates (when the hour-stem eating-and-wounding is the useful god and functions, one obtains strong support from subordinates).

Parallel-and-rob. The parallel means oneself. The rob means siblings and friends; in matters of money it means loss and drain; in danger it means a friend who takes the blow for you; it means disputes; it means a wife taken from you; in career prediction the rob means resistance and obstruction.

Owl-seal. Matters and affairs. To a leader it means the right to sign. To an ordinary person it means career. Among the six relations it means the mother. It means a diploma, or cultural level, or cultivation.

Note: a diploma and a cultural level are not always the same thing. Some people have modest diplomas and a high cultural level, so “cultural level” is the safer term when judging. If you must read the diploma, read only the initial diploma, because officials at county level and above, and the heads of listed companies and some other enterprises, though their cultural level may be modest, have all bought or been given refresher qualifications at master's or doctoral level. Reading diplomas has real meaning only for people who studied honestly.

3. Different questions, different meanings for the same ten god

When reading wealth:

• Officer-and-killer: drains wealth
• Owl-seal: matters and affairs
• Wealth star: money
• Eating-and-wounding: the source of wealth
• Parallel-and-rob: loss of wealth

When reading official career:

• Officer-and-killer: office
• Owl-seal: the official seal, authority
• Wealth star: the foundation of office
• Eating-and-wounding, when blocked: ideals
• Parallel-and-rob: obstruction and contention

When reading injury, illness and disaster:

• Officer-and-killer: illness, injury, disaster
• Owl-seal: rescue, the doctor
• Wealth star: the symptoms
• Eating-and-wounding: medicine
• Parallel-and-rob: health

When reading lawsuits and disputes:

• Officer-and-killer: the other party's business
• Owl-seal: the pleadings, the dispute itself
• Wealth (money): the reason
• Eating-and-wounding: one's own business
• Parallel-and-rob: accomplices and helpers

When reading imprisonment:

• Officer-and-killer: the prison
• Owl-seal: the crime
• Wealth (money): the matter at issue
• Eating-and-wounding: the lawyer
• Parallel-and-rob: accomplices and helpers

When reading romance and affairs:

• Officer-and-killer: the husband or lover (for a woman reading marriage); the woman's family (for a man reading marriage)
• Owl-seal: the man's family; one's own family's money as one's strength; the partner or lover (for a man reading marriage)
• Eating-and-wounding: relatives and friends; one's own strength
• Parallel-and-rob: one's own family; relatives and friends

4. Why the same unfavourable god means different things according to direction, feng shui and bodily features

For people born under one bazi, the useful and unfavourable gods are indistinguishable on the time system. But when those people move in different directions, the inauspicious (or auspicious) meaning of an unfavourable (or useful) stem that looks identical on the time system differs enormously — because the energy of direction is greater than the energy of time. So if a person's chart has “jia wood as the unfavourable god” and a jia year comes, the time system guarantees a disaster belonging to the jia unfavourable god. But if that person goes to work in a fire direction and does not return to the origin point for a year, then not only does the disaster not occur — he obtains good things of the jia kind. And if instead he goes to work for a year in the jia direction, the direction of the unfavourable god, then the danger certainly does occur.

By the same token, because the energy of feng shui is greater than the energy of direction, if a person with jia as unfavourable god has strong auspicious sand in the jia direction of his living environment, then in a jia year he too is greatly fortunate and nothing bad happens — even if he travels to the jia direction of the unfavourable god, nothing bad of that kind occurs.

And likewise, a person's bodily features stand for the sand-and-water properties of the corresponding position in his feng shui. If the body part that the jia unfavourable god stands for — the chest — has happened to grow into the state of the useful god rather than the state of the jia unfavourable god, then in a jia year he is likewise greatly fortunate and no disaster occurs.

Remember this: everything predicted on the time system is only information, only a signal. Whether that signal becomes a fact is decided entirely by the person's direction of movement and feng shui environment.