Ten Gods in BaZi: What Each One Actually Means

The ten gods — 十神 — are the part of BaZi that sounds most like fortune telling and is in fact the most mechanical. There are not ten gods. There are five relationships, each of which comes in two polarities, and the multiplication produces ten names.

Everything else follows. Every heavenly stem in your chart, including the stems hidden inside the branches, is classified by how it stands to your day master, and the classification is done by a fixed table with no interpretation in it. You can check any of it by hand.

Five relations, measured from one character

The reference point is the day master — the stem of your day pillar, the character that stands for you. Every other character is then read by two questions only:

1. What is its element relation to the day master? Same element, or something the day master produces, controls, is controlled by, or was produced by.
2. Does its polarity match the day master's? Yang against yang, or yin against yin, is one answer; mismatched is the other.

Relation	Meaning	Same polarity	Opposite polarity
Peer	same element as the day master	Companion 比肩	Rob Wealth 劫财
Output	what the day master produces	Eating God 食神	Hurting Officer 伤官
Wealth	what the day master controls	Indirect Wealth 偏财	Direct Wealth 正财
Officer	what controls the day master	Seven Killings 七杀	Direct Officer 正官
Resource	what produced the day master	Indirect Seal 偏印	Direct Seal 正印

That table is the whole system. There is nothing more to memorise — the ten gods calculator applies it to your own chart, and the methodology page names the engine fields it uses, so the same table can be reproduced from scratch.

The names are worse than the ideas

Before going further, deal with the English. Some of these translations are genuinely alarming, and they are the reason people assume a chart is judging them.

Seven Killings (七杀) sounds like a body count. It means: an element that controls your day master, at the same polarity — control that arrives bluntly, without ceremony. The classically paired name for it is 偏官, "off-centre officer": the same officer relationship, delivered in the form that does not ask permission first. Whether that reads as pressure or as decisive focus depends on the whole chart, not on the translation.

Rob Wealth (劫财) sounds like a thief. It is your own element at the opposite polarity — a peer, but the kind that competes for the same resources. In social charts it is often read as boldness; the ominous name is a 19th-century rendering, not a verdict.

Eating God (食神) sounds like it belongs to a different text entirely. It is what your day master produces at matching polarity — output that flows evenly: craft, teaching, the thing you can do for hours without friction.

The pattern to notice is that each scary name is a structural description wearing a dramatic costume. Read the table, not the label.

One real chart, character by character

Take the chart this site uses as its worked example — 4 February 1990, 10:00, Taipei, giving 己巳 丁丑 庚子 辛巳. The day master is 庚, Yang Metal, so every other character is measured against metal.

Position	Character	Ten god
Year stem	己	Direct Seal 正印
Month stem	丁	Direct Officer 正官
Hour stem	辛	Rob Wealth 劫财
Year branch 巳 — primary	丙	Seven Killings 七杀
Year branch 巳 — secondary	庚 · 戊	Companion 比肩 · Indirect Seal 偏印
Month branch 丑 — primary	己	Direct Seal 正印
Month branch 丑 — secondary	癸 · 辛	Hurting Officer 伤官 · Rob Wealth 劫财
Day branch 子	癸	Hurting Officer 伤官
Hour branch 巳	丙 · 庚 · 戊	Seven Killings · Companion · Indirect Seal

Two things are already visible. First, the day master itself is not classified — it is the reference, so it never appears as its own ten god. Second, the branches are doing most of the work: 巳 alone carries three ten gods, because it hides three stems.

Every hidden stem carries its own ten god

This is the step beginners skip, and it is why a chart with only eight characters can carry thirteen or fourteen classifications.

Branches conceal between one and three stems each (the full list is on the stems and branches reference). Those hidden stems are not decoration — they are read, and each one gets its own ten god. In the worked chart, four visible stems plus ten hidden stems give fourteen characters, of which thirteen are classified.

The most consequential hidden stem is the one in your month branch, because that is the season you were born into. In this chart the month branch is 丑, whose primary hidden stem is 己 — Direct Seal. That means the heaviest single position in the chart speaks the resource relation, not the officer relation its visible stem 丁 suggests. The surface and the substance disagree, and the reading turns on noticing that.

A chart can hold none of a whole relation type

Here is the strongest evidence that ten gods are positions rather than personal qualities.

Wealth is what the day master controls. The day master here is metal, and metal controls wood — so every wood character in the chart is a wealth star. Now look at the element tally for this chart: wood appears zero times, and none of those ten hidden stems is wood either. The chart is completely wood-free, as the missing element article works through in detail.

Run the count:

Ten god	Appearances
Companion 比肩	2
Rob Wealth 劫财	2
Eating God 食神	0
Hurting Officer 伤官	2
Indirect Wealth 偏财	0
Direct Wealth 正财	0
Seven Killings 七杀	2
Direct Officer 正官	1
Indirect Seal 偏印	2
Direct Seal 正印	2

Both wealth stars are absent, and so is Eating God. If a ten god were a quantity of something you own, this chart would report zero wealth — and nobody who reads charts would say that. What it actually reports is that the wealth relationship never fires, because the element that would carry it is not present among the eight characters.

That is the correct level of description. A ten god is a name for how a character stands to your day master. It is not a claim about your bank account, your career, or your character.

What the ten gods are not

• They are not ten personality types. Nobody "is" a Rob Wealth person. Your chart holds several ten gods at once, in different positions, with different weights.
• They are not a score. We print the count because the count is arithmetic. The moment a site collapses ten gods into a single stronger-or-weaker verdict, it has added a judgement the tables do not contain.
• They are not fixed at birth. The ten gods in your chart are fixed, but a ten-year luck pillar steps new characters into the chart — and those characters bring their own ten gods, including relation types your original eight may not hold. That is a story for the luck pillars article, but it is the same machinery.

Common questions

Why are they called "gods" if they are relationships?

It is a translation convention from the Chinese 神, which covers "spirit" and "principle" as much as "deity". 十神 means "ten principles of relation". The English word imported the religious sense that the Chinese term does not require, which is why so much English-language BaZi writing drifts towards horoscope register. We keep the standard English name because it is what you will search for, and explain what it actually means.

Do I need to memorise all ten?

No. Memorise the five relations and the polarity rule. The ten names are what falls out of the multiplication, and the calculator will do it for you on any chart — including the hidden stems, which is where hand-work usually goes wrong.

Which ten god matters most?

The one sitting in your month branch, because that position is your season. After that, the ten gods of the characters that root your day master and the ones that sit in your day branch. A ten god on a strong position is not the same as the same ten god on a weak one, and a count that ignores position is only a starting observation.

Does having a ten god mean it will happen?

No. 正官 Direct Officer does not mean you will hold office; it means the character carrying it stands in the officer relationship to your day master. Whether that reads as career, discipline, or pressure depends on the chart it sits in — and on the weighting choices we deliberately publish rather than hide, because published schools disagree.

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See every ten god in your own chart, surface stems and hidden stems together, with the rule shown in full: the ten gods calculator is free and needs no account. If you want the foundation underneath it first, start with the day master — the one character all ten are measured from.