The Five Elements tell you what's in a chart. The Ten Gods tell you what it means. They're the layer where BaZi stops being a tally of Wood and Fire and starts describing a person — their money, their authority, their creativity, and where each of those will break. Here are all ten.
Your Day Master is the reference point. Every other character in your chart stands in exactly one of five relationships to it, borrowed straight from the generating and controlling cycles of the Five Elements:
Five relationships. Each then splits in two, depending on whether the other character's Yin/Yang polarity matches yours or opposes it. Five × two = ten.
| Relationship | Same polarity | Opposite polarity |
|---|---|---|
| Same element as you | Friend 比肩 | Rob Wealth 劫财 |
| You generate it | Eating God 食神 | Hurting Officer 伤官 |
| You control it | Indirect Wealth 偏财 | Direct Wealth 正财 |
| It controls you | Seven Killings 七杀 | Direct Officer 正官 |
| It generates you | Indirect Resource 偏印 | Direct Resource 正印 |
There's a rule of thumb hiding in that table. Same polarity means unmediated; opposite polarity means moderated. Two Yang forces meet head-on with nothing between them — raw, intense, sometimes destructive. Yang meeting Yin is a relationship with give in it: attraction, negotiation, structure. That's why Seven Killings (same polarity) is brutal where Direct Officer (opposite) is merely strict.
Before the individual gods, learn the five groups. Practitioners talk in families far more than in individual gods.
| Family | Contains | Governs |
|---|---|---|
| Companion 比劫 | Friend, Rob Wealth | Peers, siblings, competitors, self-reliance |
| Output 食伤 | Eating God, Hurting Officer | Creativity, expression, children (women) |
| Wealth 财 | Direct & Indirect Wealth | Money, resources, wife (men) |
| Officer 官杀 | Direct Officer, Seven Killings | Authority, career, husband (women) |
| Resource 印 | Direct & Indirect Resource | Learning, mother, protection, credentials |
And the families run in a cycle, each feeding the next:
Resource → Self → Output → Wealth → Officer → Resource
Read that as a life story. Your mother and your education (Resource) build you. You express yourself (Output). Your expression earns money (Wealth). Money buys standing and responsibility (Officer). Standing brings you back to learning and protection (Resource). It closes.
Each family also controls the one two steps ahead: Companion spends Wealth, Wealth corrupts Resource, Resource smothers Output, Output defies Officer, Officer disciplines Companion. Every classical BaZi pattern is somewhere in those ten arrows.
Your own element, your own polarity. A mirror. Siblings, peers, colleagues, competitors who play by the same rules you do.
At its best: independence, self-reliance, physical stamina, the ability to hold a position alone. Friend-heavy people don't need permission.
At its worst: stubbornness, an inability to be led, and a chart full of mouths at the same table — Companions dilute Wealth, because everyone is reaching for the same plate.
Your element, opposite polarity. The name is not subtle. Rob Wealth is the peer who is not playing by your rules — the charismatic partner, the friend you go into business with, the person you can't say no to.
At its best: boldness, magnetism, the willingness to take a risk a Friend would refuse. Excellent for anyone whose work requires nerve.
At its worst: money leaks — through partnerships, generosity, gambling, siblings, loans that don't come back. Rob Wealth in a Wealth-poor chart is a lifelong pattern of earning well and keeping little.
What you generate, same polarity. Gentle, sustained, pleasurable output. Cooking, teaching, craft, writing that flows rather than fights. Classically it's the star of longevity and of contentment.
At its best: talent expressed easily and without agenda. Eating God people enjoy the process. They also, crucially, tame the Seven Killings — more on that below.
At its worst: softness, indulgence, drift. Nothing sharpens them because nothing has to.
What you generate, opposite polarity. Sharp, brilliant, insubordinate output. The performer, the critic, the founder who thinks the incumbents are idiots and says so on stage.
It's named for what it destroys: Officer, meaning rules, hierarchy, reputation. Hurting Officer is the most talented and most self-sabotaging of the ten.
At its best: genius, star power, originality, the courage to break a thing that deserves breaking.
At its worst: arrogance, contempt for process, lawsuits, burnt bridges, a career of brilliant work and unnecessary enemies.
The classical warning is 伤官见官 — "Hurting Officer meets Direct Officer." When both appear, the chart contains an authority to defy and the instinct to defy it. Traditional texts describe endless trouble. Modern reading: this person will fight their institution, and it will cost them.
What you control, opposite polarity. Earned, steady, predictable money. A salary. Careful accumulation. Property you keep.
At its best: diligence, thrift, financial reliability. In a man's chart, Direct Wealth is the wife star.
At its worst: small-mindedness, penny-pinching, a horizon that never extends past next month's budget.
What you control, same polarity. Windfall money. Deals, commissions, ventures, the score that comes in bursts rather than monthly.
At its best: entrepreneurial instinct, generosity, wide social reach, comfort with risk. Indirect Wealth people are usually good with people and casual about money.
At its worst: feast and famine, spending as fast as it arrives. In a man's chart it traditionally signifies a lover rather than a wife — and a chart with heavy Indirect Wealth and thin Direct Wealth was read, bluntly, as a wandering eye.
What controls you, opposite polarity. Legitimate authority. Rules you accept. Titles, reputation, professional standing, the law.
At its best: integrity, discipline, a natural fit for institutions. In a woman's chart, Direct Officer is the husband star.
At its worst: rigidity, over-caution, a person so shaped by the rules that they can't imagine acting outside them.
What controls you, same polarity. Pressure with nothing between you and it. Crisis, competition, danger, the enemy at the gate. Also called Indirect Officer (偏官), which flatters it.
This is the star of generals, surgeons, founders, and anyone whose competence only shows up when things are on fire.
At its best: decisiveness, physical courage, the ability to act while everyone else is deliberating. Enormous drive.
At its worst: tyranny, violence, or — if the Day Master is weak — simply being crushed. Seven Killings doesn't negotiate.
Which brings us to the most celebrated configuration in classical BaZi: 食神制杀, "the Eating God controls the Seven Killings." Your Output element controls the very thing that attacks you. In practice it describes someone who converts pressure into work — the crisis becomes the book, the company, the operation. Pressure that would break another person becomes their output.
What generates you, opposite polarity. Nourishment. Mother, mentors, education, credentials, protection, the institution that has your back.
At its best: learning, reputation, moral seriousness, support that arrives when you need it. Paired with Direct Officer it forms 官印相生 — the classical scholar-official, authority and learning feeding each other. The archetype of the trusted senior professional.
At its worst: dependence, procrastination, a person so protected they never had to produce anything. Resource smothers Output — too much support and nothing gets made.
What generates you, same polarity. Also called the Owl God (枭神), which tells you how the classics felt about it. Unorthodox nourishment: metaphysics, research, niche expertise, intuition, the knowledge nobody assigned you.
At its best: penetrating insight, originality of thought, mastery of a strange and specific domain. Common in the charts of researchers, analysts, and — unsurprisingly — metaphysicians.
At its worst: isolation, overthinking, suspicion, a mind that circles. And 枭神夺食, "the Owl God devours the Eating God": Indirect Resource controls Output, so the person thinks instead of making. They read one more book instead of shipping.
Here's what separates a real reading from a horoscope: none of the Ten Gods is good or bad on its own. Whether a god helps you depends entirely on whether your Day Master is strong or weak.
| Day Master | Favorable gods | Unfavorable gods |
|---|---|---|
| Strong — surplus energy | Output, Wealth, Officer — anything that uses you up | Resource, Companion — more support tips into excess |
| Weak — overextended | Resource, Companion — nourishment and allies | Output, Wealth, Officer — more drain crushes you |
Read that twice, because it inverts every horoscope instinct you have. Wealth is not automatically good. A weak Day Master buried in Wealth is someone who spends their life chasing money that ruins their health — the resource is there and they haven't the strength to carry it. Seven Killings is not automatically bad. A strong Day Master with Seven Killings is a person built for pressure, wasted in a comfortable job.
This is also why "you're missing Metal, wear white" is nearly meaningless advice. The question was never which element is absent. It's which element is favorable — and a missing unfavorable element is the best news in the chart.
Ming labels every character in your chart with its Ten God, calls your Day Master strength, and tells you which gods are working for you and which are working against — in plain English, not classical Chinese.
Get MingThe Ten Gods also encode relationships, and the mapping is gendered in the classical texts.
A chart with no spouse star at all doesn't mean no marriage — it means the relationship is read from the Spouse Palace (the Day Branch) and from the Luck Pillars that bring the missing star in. This is the backbone of chart-matching, which we cover in BaZi compatibility.
Worth naming the obvious: these gendered readings are a thousand years old and carry the assumptions of the society that produced them. "Hurting Officer harms the husband star" was a claim with real consequences for real women. The structural mechanics — Output controls Officer — hold up fine. The moral conclusions the classics drew from them do not have to.
Once every character is labelled, the chart reads as a sentence. Some examples of what practitioners see instantly:
None of these is a fortune. They're patterns — descriptions of where the friction in a life is structurally likely to sit. What you do about it is the part BaZi never claimed to determine.
The ten possible relationships between your Day Master and any other character in your chart. Five relationships — same element, you generate it, you control it, it controls you, it generates you — each split in two by whether the polarity matches. That gives Friend, Rob Wealth, Eating God, Hurting Officer, Indirect Wealth, Direct Wealth, Seven Killings, Direct Officer, Indirect Resource, and Direct Resource.
No. Seven Killings is raw, unmediated pressure, and whether that helps or harms depends entirely on Day Master strength. A strong Day Master with Seven Killings gets decisiveness and courage under fire — the temperament of a general or a founder. A weak Day Master with heavy Seven Killings gets crushed. The classical remedy is an Eating God to channel it.
Both are the element your Day Master controls. Direct Wealth has the opposite polarity and represents steady, earned, predictable income — a salary, careful savings. Indirect Wealth shares your polarity and represents opportunistic, windfall, entrepreneurial money arriving in bursts. In a man's chart, Direct Wealth traditionally signifies the wife and Indirect Wealth a lover.
Sharp creative output — brilliance, performance, iconoclasm, the instinct to say the thing nobody else will. It's named for what it damages: the Direct Officer, meaning rules, authority, and reputation. Hurting Officer people are often extraordinarily talented and chronically in trouble with institutions.
It depends on whether your Day Master is strong or weak, and nothing else. A strong Day Master has surplus energy and benefits from the gods that consume it: Output, Wealth, Officer. A weak Day Master is overextended and benefits from the gods that feed it: Resource and Companion. The same Seven Killings that makes one person a leader makes another a victim.
食神制杀, one of the most prized configurations in classical BaZi. The Eating God is what your Day Master generates, and it controls the Seven Killings that would otherwise attack you. In practice: someone who converts pressure into creative output rather than being broken by it. The crisis becomes the work.
Not from the eight visible characters alone — there aren't enough slots, and your Day Master occupies one. Counting hidden stems inside the Earthly Branches, a chart can reference most of them. Luck Pillars and annual pillars then bring in the rest over a lifetime, which is why a decade can feel like it belongs to a completely different person.