BaZi day master · 8 of 10
Yin Metal Day Master (辛金) in BaZi
辛 is yin metal — the jewel, the polished edge, the finished instrument. It is read as refinement and discernment: metal valued for what it already is rather than for what force can make of it. If your day pillar begins with 辛, this is the character the rest of your chart is measured against.
The short version
辛 is metal after the work — read for quality, standards and selectivity.
Classical practice treats 辛 as the more discriminating of the two metals: it is defined by what it refuses, not only by what it is.
Is your day master 辛?
Free · no sign-up
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. 辛 is the 8th of the ten stems, so “is my day master 辛?” reduces to one question about one character — and it can be answered from the date alone.
- 3
Set it as the reference
Once 辛 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 辛 — 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 辛 means as a day master
辛 is metal at yin: the jewel, the fine blade, the tuned instrument. Where 庚 is read through a process — raw material that becomes useful when it is worked — 辛 is read through a standard. It is the stem most associated with quality judgements, taste and the ability to tell two similar things apart.
The comparison to 庚 is where most confusion starts. 辛 is not "softer metal": it is the same element at the opposite pole, and the classical treatment gives it the sharper edge in a different sense. 庚 cuts through an argument; 辛 notices that the argument was badly made. Both are metal, and neither is the improved version of the other.
The ten gods, read from 辛
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 辛 as the reference the five relations resolve as follows: 金 itself is the Peer, Earth generates 金 and is the Resource, Water is what 金 produces and is the Output, Wood is what 金 controls and is the Wealth, and Fire is what controls 金 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, 辛 is the day stem itself, so the four visible stems around it each carry one of these names.
What feeds 辛, and what spends it
A chart is not read by counting elements — it is read by what each element does to the day master. Earth (戊 己) generates 金, so it is the Resource: what supplies 辛 without being asked. 庚 辛 is the Peer. Water (壬 癸) is what 金 produces, so it is the Output: energy that leaves as work, expression or craft. Wood (甲 乙) is what 金 controls, so it is the Wealth. Fire (丙 丁) is what controls 金, so it is the Officer — the element that acts on 辛 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 辛 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 辛 turns up in the branches
辛 appears inside three branches: 酉, where it is the primary hidden stem, and 丑 and 戌, where it is a secondary one. Both of those are transitional earth branches, which is the classical reason a small amount of worked metal is said to survive inside them.
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 金 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
辛 gets read as delicate, and then every hard luck pillar is read as damage. The classical image is not fragility — it is specificity. A finished object is defined by tolerances, which is why 辛 charts are read for standards and for how they respond when the standard is not met. That is a sharper statement than "sensitive".
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 5 February 1990, Taipei.
Input
- Date
- 5 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
辛 — Yin Metal
Day pillar 辛丑 · 纳音 壁上土 · image the jewel
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
辛丑
壁上土
Hour 时
癸巳
长流水
- Wood113%
- Fire225%
- Earth225%
- Metalself225%
- Water113%
Surface tally 8 of 8 — all five elements appear at least once. Support 4, drain 4, 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
5 February 1990 gives 庚午 戊寅 辛丑 癸巳 — the day pillar is 辛丑, so the day master is 辛. 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 1 · Fire 2 · Earth 2 · Metal 2 · Water 1 — support 4, drain 4, 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 辛.
Peer
Same element as the day master
- 庚劫财 · Rob Wealth
- 辛比肩 · Companion
Output
What the day master produces
- 壬伤官 · Hurting Officer
- 癸食神 · Eating God
Wealth
What the day master controls
- 甲正财 · Direct Wealth
- 乙偏财 · Indirect Wealth
Officer
What controls the day master
- 丙正官 · Direct Officer
- 丁七杀 · Seven Killings
Resource
What produces the day master
- 戊正印 · Direct Seal
- 己偏印 · Indirect Seal
辛 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 辛
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.
- 丑Ox · Chǒu土 · late wintersecondary hidden stem
- 酉Rooster · Yǒu金 · mid-autumnprimary hidden stem
- 戌Dog · Xū土 · late autumnsecondary hidden stem
酉 carry it as the primary hidden stem; 丑 戌 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 Yin Metal day master mean?
- 辛 is metal at the yin pole: the jewel or the finished instrument, read as refinement and discernment. It describes the starting material of a chart — what the chart does with a preference for quality is the reading, and that depends on all eight characters.
- Is 辛 a softer version of 庚?
- No. Polarity is orientation, not intensity. 庚 is read as force that becomes useful through work; 辛 is read as a standard that is applied. Classical practice actually treats 辛 as the more discriminating of the two, which is not the same as either stronger or weaker.
- Why does metal appear inside earth branches?
- Because earth generates metal in the classical cycle, so the transitional earth branches 丑 and 戌 are said to carry a small amount of it — along with 酉, where 辛 is the primary hidden stem. This is a fixed mapping rather than an interpretation, and the table on this page is generated from it.
- What controls 辛, and what does 辛 control?
- Fire controls metal, so 丙 and 丁 are what act on 辛 — Direct Officer and Seven Killings respectively, since 丙 is opposite in polarity and 丁 is the same. Metal controls wood, so 甲 and 乙 are its Wealth. The full stem-by-stem map for 辛 is on this page.
Next
Full chart
Get your own four pillars
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.