Yang Metal Day Master (庚金) in BaZi

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 庚 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, 庚 is the day stem itself, so the four visible stems around it each carry one of these names.

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 庚 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 庚 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 庚 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.

庚 appears inside two branches: 申, where it is the primary hidden stem, and 巳, where it is a secondary one. 巳 is a fire branch, which is the classical reason metal is described as being born inside fire — it is extracted rather than found ready-made.

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 blade image gets read as aggression, which is one step too far. Classical practice reads 庚 as intolerance of ambiguity — a preference for a decision over a discussion — and treats the sharpness as a property of the material rather than a prediction about behaviour. A 庚 chart with strong, well-placed output reads very differently from one without.