Tool · BaZi relationships
Ten Gods Calculator (十神)
The Ten Gods — 十神 — are not ten deities. They are ten relationships. Every heavenly stem in your chart, including the stems hidden inside each branch, is classified by how it stands to your day master. This calculator computes all of them and counts how often each one appears.
The short version
A ten god is a relationship, not a quality. 正官 Direct Officer does not mean “you are disciplined” — it means this character stands in the officer relationship to your day master.
Five relationship kinds, two polarities each. That multiplication is the entire system — there is nothing further to memorise. Everything else is interpretation, and interpretation depends on the whole chart.
Your ten gods
Free · no sign-up
The day stem is the reference point, so it is not classified against itself. Every other stem — visible or hidden — is.
How it’s calculated
- 1
Find your day master
The heavenly stem of your day pillar. It is the fixed point of the chart: every other character is described by what it does to this one, never the reverse.
- 2
Compare element and polarity
Five relationship kinds — same element, what you produce, what you control, what controls you, what produces you — crossed with two polarities, same or opposite, gives ten. That is all ten gods are.
- 3
Count, then read the position
A ten god appearing three times is a theme; one appearing once is a detail. Position matters too — the month pillar carries the most weight, the hour pillar speaks to later life and children.
The full rule set — every convention, in order, with the engine field names — is published on the methodology page.
The whole rule, in one paragraph
Take the element of your day master. Compare it with the element of the character you are classifying. If they are the same element, the relation is Peer. If your day master produces that element, the relation is Output. If your day master controls it, the relation is Wealth. If it controls your day master, the relation is Officer. If it produces your day master, the relation is Resource.
Now compare polarity — yang with yang, or yang with yin. Same polarity gives the “indirect” or blunt member of each pair; opposite polarity gives the “direct” or aligned member. Five relations times two polarities is ten gods, and the engine does nothing else. The tables on this page list all ten with their relationship and polarity, so you can check any chart by hand.
Two details are easy to get wrong when reading tables online. First, the branches are not single characters: each one hides one to three stems, and those hidden stems carry their own ten gods. Second, the day stem itself is your day master — it is the reference point, not a Companion, even though a naive table would classify it as 比肩.
The most common misreading
財 Wealth gods are usually translated as money, and 官 Officer gods as career. Both translations are too narrow to be useful. 財 means what you control — which includes income and assets, but also resources, staff, projects and students. 官 means what controls you by rule: duties, standards, accountability, position, and in classical readings a partner.
The same naming problem runs through the set. 七殺 Seven Killings sounds violent and is usually just pressure — a deadline, a demanding role, a situation that will not wait. 傷官 Hurting Officer sounds destructive and is one of the most consistently productive configurations for anyone who works with ideas. The names come from a time and a rhetorical tradition; the underlying relationships are structural.
The second common misreading is treating a heavy ten god as a personality verdict. A chart with four Officers is not “a disciplined person”. It is a chart where the officer relationship keeps recurring — which can mean structure, or can mean a life organised around other people’s rules. Which one it is cannot be read off the count.
How ten gods are actually used
In practice a reader does two things with this layer. First, they look at which relationships recur, and where — because a ten god in the month pillar is part of the structure of the chart, while the same ten god only in the year pillar is background. Second, they look at what the day master needs. A strong day master with abundant Peers reads differently from a weak one with the same configuration.
What the layer is genuinely good at is describing how a chart is organised: whether it is built around output, around control, around support, or around resources. That is a structural question, and it is answerable from the eight characters without any prediction at all.
What it is not good at is naming events. No configuration of ten gods tells you a date, a person, or an outcome. That requires the luck pillars and the annual cycles, which are a separate layer computed from the same chart.
A worked example
The same reproducible case as elsewhere on the site: 4 February 1990, 10:00, Taipei — fourteen minutes before 立春 that year. Day master 庚 yang metal, so every stem below is classified against metal.
Input
- Date
- 4 Feb 1990
- Time
- 10:00
- Place
- Taipei, Taiwan
- Time zone
- Asia/Taipei
Nearest 节
Next: 立春, 4 Feb 1990 10:14Birth at 10:00 — 14 minutes before the year boundary.
Year 年
己巳
Jǐ Sì
stem → Direct Seal 正印
hidden → 丙庚戊七杀 · 比肩 · 偏印
Month 月
丁丑
Dīng Chǒu
stem → Direct Officer 正官
hidden → 己癸辛正印 · 伤官 · 劫财
Day 日
庚子
Gēng Zǐ
stem → Day Master · Yang Metal
hidden → 癸伤官
Hour 时
辛巳
Xīn Sì
stem → Rob Wealth 劫财
hidden → 丙庚戊七杀 · 比肩 · 偏印
Read the chart, not the individual characters
Three of the four visible stems are relationships to 庚: 己 Earth generates metal (Direct Seal), 丁 Fire controls it (Direct Officer), 辛 Metal is its own kind at the opposite polarity (Rob Wealth). The hidden layer adds six more instances. Notice what the count surfaces: nothing is dominant, and the same two relationships — Direct Seal and Seven Killings — each appear twice, once visible and once hidden. That pattern, not any single entry, is the thing a reader would pick up first.
Engine v1.1.0 · these eight characters, this tally — reproduce them any time from the same input.
All ten, and the five relations they come from
Five relationship kinds, each with two polarities. That multiplication is the entire system — there is nothing else to memorise.
Peer
Same element as the day master
Siblings, colleagues, competitors — your own kind.
Output
What the day master produces
Ideas, work, expression, children in classical readings.
Wealth
What the day master controls
Assets, income, resources, and the people you direct.
Officer
What controls the day master
Rules, duties, hierarchy, pressure, accountability.
Resource
What produces the day master
Learning, support, credentials, the people who back you.
- 比肩CompanionPeersame polaritySame element, same polarity — a peer standing level with you. Independence, self-reliance, competition among equals.
- 劫财Rob WealthPeeropposite polaritySame element, opposite polarity — the peer who takes a share. Boldness, social risk, money that moves.
- 食神Eating GodOutputsame polarityWhat you generate, expressed evenly. Craft, teaching, enjoyment, steady creative output.
- 伤官Hurting OfficerOutputopposite polarityWhat you generate, expressed against the grain. Talent, originality, impatience with authority.
- 偏财Indirect WealthWealthsame polarityWhat you control, at range. Opportunistic income, deal-making, resources that arrive in bursts.
- 正财Direct WealthWealthopposite polarityWhat you control, steadily. Salaried income, accumulated assets, thrift and admin.
- 七杀Seven KillingsOfficersame polarityWhat controls you, bluntly. Pressure, discipline under load, decisive action when it is handled well.
- 正官Direct OfficerOfficeropposite polarityWhat controls you, by rule. Structure, responsibility, position, reputation held to a standard.
- 偏印Indirect SealResourcesame polarityWhat generates you, off-centre. Unconventional learning, intuition, methods that are not in the textbook.
- 正印Direct SealResourceopposite polarityWhat generates you, squarely. Formal education, support from elders, protection and legitimacy.
Questions
- Why is my day stem not listed as a ten god?
- Because it is the thing everything else is measured against. A table that labels the day stem 比肩 Companion is mechanically labelling it against itself. We show it as “Day Master (self)” instead.
- Do hidden stems count?
- Yes, and skipping them is the most common shortcut in free calculators. Each earthly branch hides one to three stems — 寅 hides 甲, 丙 and 戊 — and those are real characters in the chart. Our count includes them and marks them separately so you can see where each one came from.
- Does 七殺 Seven Killings mean danger?
- No. Despite the name, it is the officer relationship at the same polarity, and in practice it is read as pressure and edge rather than harm — a demanding role, a hard deadline, a situation that forces a decision. It is often one of the more productive configurations in a working chart.
- Why does my chart show wealth gods but I am not wealthy?
- Because 財 describes the relationship “what you control”, not the outcome “you have money”. A wealth god in the chart says that the control relationship is present; whether it converts into assets depends on how well the day master can hold it, which is a question about the whole chart rather than one character.
Next
Day master calculator
Find the reference point these ten relationships are all measured against.
OpenFive elements calculator
The layer beneath this one — what the chart is physically made of.
OpenHeavenly stems & earthly branches
The two alphabets behind every character, with the full sixty-pair table.
OpenFull 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.