BaZi day master · 9 of 10
Yang Water Day Master (壬水) in BaZi
壬 is yang water — the ocean, the great river, water in motion at scale. It is read as range and adaptability: the largest thing in a chart by volume, taking the shape of whatever contains it. If your day pillar begins with 壬, this is the character the rest of your chart is measured against.
The short version
壬 is water that moves — defined by flow and by what it can carry.
Water is the element most dependent on the month of birth: a winter 壬 and a summer 壬 are read as different propositions entirely.
Is your day master 壬?
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Enter your birth date — nothing else is required for this answer. If the result comes back with a different stem, the profile for it is one click away at the bottom of the page.
How it’s calculated
- 1
Take the day pillar
The day pillar advances exactly one step per calendar day with no gaps and no leap corrections. That continuous count is what makes it reliable: it does not depend on the calendar reform, the timezone or the season.
- 2
Read its heavenly stem
The stem of that pair is the day master. 壬 is the 9th of the ten stems, so “is my day master 壬?” reduces to one question about one character — and it can be answered from the date alone.
- 3
Set it as the reference
Once 壬 is fixed, the other seven characters stop being a list and become relationships. Every stem in the chart is named by how it stands to 壬 — that is the table on this page, and it is different for each of the ten stems.
The full rule set — every convention, in order, with the engine field names — is published on the methodology page.
What 壬 means as a day master
壬 is water at yang: the ocean, the long river, the flood. Its defining property in classical practice is that it takes the shape of its container while remaining unchanged in substance — which is why 壬 is read as adaptability rather than as softness. It is also the stem most associated with movement: the ocean does not settle.
癸 is the counterpart: rain, mist, dew, water that arrives quietly and gets into everything. The contrast is scale and mode. 壬 is read as capacity — what a chart can absorb and carry — and 癸 as penetration — what a chart can reach without being noticed. Water is the element where the two poles are least alike in texture.
The ten gods, read from 壬
The ten gods are not ten things — they are five relations, each of which comes in two polarities, and the relation is always measured from the day master. With 壬 as the reference the five relations resolve as follows: 水 itself is the Peer, Metal generates 水 and is the Resource, Wood is what 水 produces and is the Output, Fire is what 水 controls and is the Wealth, and Earth is what controls 水 and is the Officer.
The table below is produced by the engine from that rule alone — the element relation, multiplied by whether the two stems share a polarity. Nothing in it is memorised and nothing in it is interpreted. This is the reason a chart can be re-read by anyone: change the day master and all ten names change at once, in a way that is checkable rather than a matter of opinion. On the chart in the worked example below, 壬 is the day stem itself, so the four visible stems around it each carry one of these names.
What feeds 壬, and what spends it
A chart is not read by counting elements — it is read by what each element does to the day master. Metal (庚 辛) generates 水, so it is the Resource: what supplies 壬 without being asked. 壬 癸 is the Peer. Wood (甲 乙) is what 水 produces, so it is the Output: energy that leaves as work, expression or craft. Fire (丙 丁) is what 水 controls, so it is the Wealth. Earth (戊 己) is what controls 水, so it is the Officer — the element that acts on 壬 and therefore carries the chart's pressure.
Five relations doubled by polarity gives the ten gods, and that is the whole structure. What it does not give you is a verdict on whether 壬 has enough support, because that judgement depends on how much you weight the month of birth, whether hidden stems count fully, and whether rootedness outranks raw count — and three competent practitioners can disagree. So we print the counts and the support/drain split, and leave the weighing to the reading rather than hiding a weighting model inside a score.
Where 壬 turns up in the branches
壬 appears inside two branches: 亥, where it is the primary hidden stem, and 申, where it is a secondary one. Both are autumn and winter branches, which is why water is the element most obviously strengthened or starved by the month a chart is born in.
This matters more than it sounds. Four of the eight characters in a chart are branches, and each branch conceals between one and three stems, so a chart can hold 水 energy in a form that never appears on the surface. The list below is generated from the same fixed hidden-stem table the calculator uses — you can check it branch by branch.
The common misreading
The ocean image gets read as "emotional" or "unstable", neither of which is classical. The image is about volume and movement: 壬 is read for how much a chart can hold and how readily it changes direction. Whether that shows up as restlessness or as range is decided by the rest of the chart, and mostly by the season.
A worked example
Every page on this site that needs a worked example uses the same approach: a real birth moment, run through the engine at build time, with the numbers printed so you can reproduce them. This page's example is 6 February 1990, Taipei.
Input
- Date
- 6 February 1990
- Time
- 10:00
- Place
- Taipei, Taiwan
- Time zone
- Asia/Taipei
Nearest 节
Next: 雨水1990-02-19 · 06:14
Year pillar 庚午 — this date is after 立春, which is what sets it.
Day master of this chart
壬 — Yang Water
Day pillar 壬寅 · 纳音 金箔金 · image the ocean
All four pillars, computed at build timeyear · month · day · hour
Year 年
庚午
路旁土
Month 月
戊寅
城头土
Day 日
壬寅
金箔金
Hour 时
乙巳
覆灯火
- Wood338%
- Fire225%
- Earth113%
- Metal113%
- Waterself113%
Surface tally 8 of 8 — all five elements appear at least once. Support 2, drain 6, counted across the four stems and four branches and not weighted by season. A single absent element is a fact about this one chart, not a verdict on it.
Ten consecutive days, ten day masters
6 February 1990 gives 庚午 戊寅 壬寅 乙巳 — the day pillar is 壬寅, so the day master is 壬. It belongs to a run of ten consecutive dates, 30 January to 8 February 1990, which produce all ten day masters exactly once, because the day pillar advances one step per calendar day and ten steps cycle through all ten stems. That same run straddles the exact minute 立春 fell in 1990 (4 February, 10:14 local), so the earlier dates sit in the 己巳 year and the later ones in the 庚午 year — which also flips the luck-pillar direction, since direction follows the year stem's polarity. On this chart the surface tally is Wood 3 · Fire 2 · Earth 1 · Metal 1 · Water 1 — support 2, drain 6, and the luck pillars run forward from 己卯.
Engine v1.1.0 · lunar-javascript@1.7.7 · these four pillars and this tally reproduce exactly from the input above, in your browser or ours.
The full stem map, computed
These ten names are not a list to memorise — they are computed by one rule: the element relation between the two stems, multiplied by whether their polarities match. The table is produced by the engine from that rule, and it changes completely the moment the day master changes away from 壬.
Peer
Same element as the day master
- 壬比肩 · Companion
- 癸劫财 · Rob Wealth
Output
What the day master produces
- 甲食神 · Eating God
- 乙伤官 · Hurting Officer
Wealth
What the day master controls
- 丙偏财 · Indirect Wealth
- 丁正财 · Direct Wealth
Officer
What controls the day master
- 戊七杀 · Seven Killings
- 己正官 · Direct Officer
Resource
What produces the day master
- 庚偏印 · Indirect Seal
- 辛正印 · Direct Seal
壬 against itself is a Peer of the same polarity, so it is always Companion 比肩. The other nine stems divide across the five relations with two in each — which is why there are exactly ten names and never eleven.
The hidden-stem table, filtered to 壬
A stem does not have to appear on the surface of a chart to be present — every branch carries one to three hidden stems, and this is where the engine finds them. The list below is generated from the same fixed table the calculator uses.
- 申Monkey · Shēn金 · early autumnsecondary hidden stem
- 亥Pig · Hài水 · early winterprimary hidden stem
亥 carry it as the primary hidden stem; 申 carry it as a lesser one. A lesser position is not a weaker claim on the element — position matters for weighting, and weighting is the step where published schools disagree.
The other nine day masters
Each stem has its own page, and they are read against each other rather than in isolation — 甲 against 乙, 丙 against 丁. Whichever one is yours, the comparison is usually where the meaning is.
Questions
- What does a Yang Water day master mean?
- 壬 is water at the yang pole: the ocean or the great river, read as range, movement and capacity. It is the starting material of a chart rather than a temperament, and how it reads depends on the month of birth and the other seven characters.
- What is the difference between 壬 and 癸?
- Scale and mode. 壬 is water at volume that takes the shape of its container; 癸 is water that arrives quietly — rain, mist, dew — and works by penetration rather than by mass. Same element, opposite polarity, and classical practice reads them as two very different energies.
- Is a 壬 day master always in a strong chart?
- No. Volume is not strength. A chart born in summer can carry 壬 and still be drained overall; we print the raw support and drain counts instead of a score, precisely because "strong enough" depends on how the month, the roots and the hidden stems are weighted — and published systems disagree on that weighting.
- What does water relate to in the ten gods?
- Metal generates water, so 庚 and 辛 are Resource relative to 壬. Water generates wood, so 甲 and 乙 are Output. What 壬 controls, and what controls 壬, are both listed in the computed table on this page — ten names that change the moment the day master changes.
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Full chart
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The calculator is free and needs no account. It shows all four pillars, hidden stems, ten gods, your element balance and ten-year luck cycles — with the engine version on the result.
BaziPattern provides AI-generated readings for entertainment and cultural exploration purposes only. Readings are not predictions, or medical, legal, or financial advice.