Bazi in Trou Ction

Bazi Introduction Everything in Bazi is revolved around the 5 elements and its interaction with one another. Therefore a good understanding of the basics will take you a long way for the learning and understanding of Bazi. It will be very useful as well if you advanced further into other subject of Chinese Metaphysics like Fengshui (the study of Qi and landform) as they also uses the concept of five elements. The five elements are namely metal, water, wood, fire, and earth. The basic relationship between the five elements are categorised into producing cycle, weakening cycle, and controlling cycle. The producing cycle

Water produces wood: Water grows wood just like plants need water to grow. Wood produces fire: We burn wood to produce fire. Fire produces earth: Fire burns everything into ashes and returns it back to the earth. Earth can be referred to as soil, sand, dust, or ashes. Earth produces metal: Metal refers to the natural minerals that grow in the earth. Metal produces water: Metal does not really produce water but attracts water during its condensation process. The weakening cycle

The five elements are weakened by element that they produce or grow, just like a mother is weakened after giving birth to her child. Therefore, metal weakens earth, earth weakens fire, fire weakens wood, wood weakens water, and water weakens metal. The controlling cycle

Metal controls wood: As wood can be chopped down by axes which is made by metal. Wood controls earth: The earth or soil is held together by the trees. Earth controls water: Just like the river or ocean which is contains/bounds the earth. Water controls fire: Water can extinguish fire. Fire controls metal: Fire is used to melt metal. The Ten Stems/Ten Day Master The five elements can be broken down into what we called ten stems by assigning a yin or yang polarity to each of the elements.

The Day Master is referring to the Day stem of a Bazi chart, which is circled in red in the chart below. As there are only ten different stems (yin and yang polarity of each of the five element), therefore we have ten Day Masters. Day Master is very important in the chart as it represents the person, the ‘self’. What the rest of the 7 characters in the chart means will be derived by their relationship with the Day Master.

Relationship with other element Element that you (The Day Master) control is your wealth element Element that controls you (The Day Master) is your influence element Element that you (The Day Master) produce is your output element Element that produces you (The Day Master) is your resource element Element that is the same as you (The Day Master) is your companion element

The Ten Gods The Ten Gods are derived when you further breakdown the five elements from table 6 above into yin and yang polarity.

Strength of elements in a chart based on season

The twelve Earthly Branches

People are familiar with the twelve animal zodiac signs that are associated to each year. For example, 2013 is a snake year. The table below shows the five elements that the animal sign contained. Determining the strength of the element will be based on the season that the person is born in, which is the same way as determining the strength of the stems’ element (Please see table 8 above)

We will use the table below to show how the season of birth can determine the strength of all the elements in the chart.

Table 10 shows that people who were born in Feb will have a tiger sign as their month branch. This also indicates that the strongest element in the chart will be wood element as he/she is born in spring. The strength of each element in the chart can be determined by using table 8 above (e.g. In spring: wood prosperous, fire strong, water weak, metal trap, and earth dead). After knowing what the element in your chart means to you and the strength of the element, you can know what your basic strength is and where your weaknesses lie. All this takes time and practice to master, but Bazi is definitely something worth investing for in your life. I will stop here for the time being, and will come back to explain a little bit more when new concepts are introduced in other articles. If you want to learn more, you may also buy books like ‘The Destiny code’ and ‘The Destiny code revealed’ written by Master Joey Yap of the Mastery Academy, which is simple and easy to understand, and suitable for beginners who would like to know more about Bazi.