The Sun and the Seasons

The character

丙 (bǐng) is the third heavenly stem, a Yang stem of the Fire element. Its partner is 丁 (dīng), Yin Fire. Where 丁 is candle, lamp and hearth, 丙 is the fire nobody struck a match for: the sun. It comes up uninvited, lights every corner of the street in the same hour, and is the reason a washing line is worth having.

The traditional image is plain. Yang Fire is daylight, noon, a summer sky with nothing in it. It is also the red coin on the horizon at six in the morning, when the sea of cloud below a mountain road turns from grey to gold and a bus driver slows down without knowing why. Both are 丙. One is the sun at its height. The other is the sun arriving.

The verse

The Dī Tiān Suǐ (滴天髓) is a Ziping text still quoted by people who read BaZi, and it gives every stem a short verse. Here is the verse for 丙 as it stands in Ren Tieqiao's edition, the 滴天髓闡微 (Dī Tiān Suǐ Chǎn Wēi), in our own translation:

丙火猛烈，欺霜侮雪。 能煅庚金，逢辛反怯。 土眾成慈，水猖顯節。 虎馬犬鄉，甲木若來，必當焚滅。

Bing fire is fierce and blazing; it scorns the frost and makes light of snow. It can forge Geng metal, yet meeting Xin it turns timid. Where earth is plentiful it grows gentle; where water runs wild it shows its backbone. In the land of tiger, horse and dog, should Jia wood come, the fire is bound to burn itself out.

Here is the verse again, phrase by phrase, in plain words.

欺霜侮雪 (the frost and the snow). The sun does not argue with winter. It simply stands there, and the ice goes soft at the edges. The line praises courage and it also describes a risk: a fire that makes light of cold may forget that some cold is deep, and a sun in a December chart is a low sun, strong in its character and short of fuel.

能煅庚金 (forging Geng). 庚 is raw Yang Metal, the ore and the axe-head. Heat is what turns ore into something with an edge. The old note to the verse says that 庚, however stubborn, is within the sun's power to forge (庚金雖頑，力能煅之), and so 丙 is the fire fit to meet a stubborn problem. The skill is in the heat. Too little and nothing changes, too much and the piece runs into the sand.

逢辛反怯 (meeting Xin, timid). 辛 is Yin Metal, the jewel, the fine and delicate thing. 丙 and 辛 are a stem combination (合), and a combination binds. The old note says that 辛 is soft by nature and that, in combining with it, the fierce fire grows weak (辛金本柔，合而反弱). Faced with something small and precious, the great fire turns careful, like a large man in a room of porcelain. We come back to this pair in Chapters 5 and 6.

土眾成慈 (much earth, gentleness). Fire gives birth to Earth, and a great deal of Earth takes the edge off the blaze, as soil banked against a fire. The old note calls Earth the child of the fire (土其子也) and reads the result as a parent's kindness. A 丙 who has been surrounded by earth for years often sounds softer than the chart first suggests.

水猖顯節 (wild water, a backbone). Water is what puts fire out. The old note calls Water the sovereign of the fire (水其君也): when 壬 and 癸 run strong, 丙 shows the steadiness of a loyal minister instead of giving way, and an old poem on 丙 adds that the still water of rivers and lakes cannot overcome it (江湖死水安能剋). The sun can stand over a flood and shine on it; the water glitters and the sun is still in the sky. Where the river rises, this Day Master is said to show what it is made of.

虎馬犬鄉 (tiger, horse, dog). These are the branches 寅 (tiger), 午 (horse) and 戌 (dog), which together form the Fire union 寅午戌. In a chart where Fire already stands in all its force, 甲木若來，必當焚滅: if 甲 (Yang Wood, the great tree) comes, the fire is bound to burn itself out. Ren Tieqiao reads the line as excess: with the branches on 寅午戌 the fire is already too fierce, and Wood that arrives to feed it only turns it towards burning out (轉致焚滅). The older note says the chart turns dry and burns away, and the tree, of course, goes with it. Either way the line warns against too much of a good thing. Fuel is welcome, up to the point where the fire stops needing it. Editions differ in this last line: the 闡微 notes that one copy reads 甲來成滅, the form Xu Lewu (徐樂吾) also quotes in his notes on the 子平真詮, while the 滴天髓輯要 has 甲來焚滅; the picture is the same in all three.

The second picture

The website calls 丙 the sun. This book adds a second picture beside the first, because one picture lets the sun off too lightly.

There is the noon sun. It is at the top of the sky, it throws no shadow, it can be looked at only briefly. Everything in its light is seen, and anyone who needs shade leaves. This is 丙 in its raw form: open-handed, loud, careless about small change and generous about everything, at its best when it is wanted and at its hardest when nobody asked.

Then there is the sun in the seasons. This one has a calendar. In spring it climbs a little each day and the buds break. In summer it is allowed to blaze, with a long evening that lets everyone cool. In autumn it lowers and the light turns copper. In winter it keeps low and short, and a field under frost depends on the few hours it gives. The same fire, but now keeping time. It knows when to rise, when to rest behind cloud and when to come back. It warms what is cold, which is a different job from impressing what is near.

A good part of the life of 丙 is a slow walk from the first picture towards the second. Neither is the better one. A sun with no seasons scorches the very crop it was supposed to ripen, and a sun that is all timetable can forget how to be bright. The reader with 丙 usually wants both: the noon that does not fear its own light, and the year that knows when the light has a purpose.

Both are teaching pictures, and the old commentators would want that said plainly. Ren Tieqiao complained that the songs of fortune-tellers had turned every stem into an object, 丙 into the sun (丙作太陽) and 丁 into a lamp, and he called reading a chart through such likenesses a great error (誠大謬也). 丙 is Yang Fire, a quality of heat and light. In this book the noon sun and the sun in its seasons are pictures of a temperament, and never a definition of the stem.

Chapter 8 is where the seasons come in properly, since the season of birth is the first thing the classical reader checks about any fire. The cover of this book is the sun coming up out of a sea of clouds. The clouds are the weather the sun keeps time against, and the picture would be poorer without them.

Where 丙 sits among the elements

BaZi arranges the five elements in two cycles, one in which each feeds the next and one in which each holds the next in check. Measured from the sun, the map reads like this:

A naming rule helps here. Because 丙 is a Yang stem, every Yang stem in a chart takes the name for matching polarity (Indirect Resource, Friend, Eating God, Indirect Wealth, Seven Killings) and every Yin stem the name for opposite polarity (Direct Resource, Rob Wealth, Hurting Officer, Direct Wealth, Direct Officer). Wood gives 甲, Yang, as Indirect Resource and 乙, Yin, as Direct Resource. Earth gives 戊 as Eating God and 己 as Hurting Officer. Chapter 3 is built on this table, and every name in it can be checked by hand from two facts, the element and the polarity.

Six readers

Six invented readers keep us company, each with 丙 as the Day Master. Their charts come from the solar calendar, worked out from the date and hour of birth. Four were chosen to give one sun for each season; the last two cover day pillars that the four miss.

Two more join them, first in shorter scenes and then, in Chapter 9, with a full reading. Aylin was born on 18 June 1979 at 09:00 with the chart 己未 庚午 丙辰 癸巳. Wahyu was born on 15 August 1987 at 17:00 with the chart 丁卯 戊申 丙申 丁酉.

Each column holds one chart, read downwards from the year to the hour. On the screen of the calculator at bazi.cards the same four pillars stand in a row, the year on the left and the hour on the right. The bold 丙 is the Day Master, the sun itself. The character that shares its cell is the day branch, which on the screen sits just under the sun: the spot BaZi gives to the home you return to and to whoever shares it.

Nothing needs decoding yet. Only notice the general feel of each. Ginevra's chart has the sun twice on top and Wood beneath it. Otieno's is crowded with Fire and has no Water and no Metal anywhere. Kaede's holds a great deal of Earth and a pair of 乙 above. Facundo's is almost all Water, with one small fire at the hour. Four skies, four suns: once the rules arrive, each will answer them in its own way.

A scene: the radio at six

Otieno is thirty-nine. At ten to six every weekday he is in a small booth in Nairobi with a cup of tea going cold, and the morning show opens on his voice. He reads the traffic, teases the weather presenter, takes a call from a woman selling mangoes at a junction who wants to say good morning to her mother. Listeners say the studio feels like a room with the curtains pulled open. He has never been asked to calm down on air.

At half past nine, off the air, the room is quieter. He has promised three people something before lunch. He has said yes to a charity event on Saturday, a school visit on Tuesday, and a cousin's wedding speech on the same Saturday. His tiredness is that of a lamp left on all day, warm to the touch.

This is 丙 in its everyday form: light that goes out to everyone and expects no receipt. The classical reader looks at that studio and sees a sun at noon, and then asks the second question, the one this book keeps asking. Where in this year is the shade?

In another city the same fire looks different. Kaede is twenty-six and works for an architecture firm in Fukuoka, in the corner where the lighting plans are drawn. She notices before anyone else that the new atrium will be lit from the wrong side at four in the afternoon. She says so in the meeting, calmly, a little too early in the meeting, and the senior partner looks at her with the expression of someone being handed a bill. Her colleagues learn within a year that her first reading of a room is usually right. She learns, more slowly, that the right sentence has an hour of the day when it lands.

What this book will not do

Nothing here can tell you what will befall you. As the Ziping school teaches it, BaZi is a vocabulary for the weather in a life: which forces are in the sky, where they push, where they hold something up. It is not an events diary. That is why the verbs are soft, "often", "usually", "can", and why they were picked deliberately.

Nor will it advise you on your health, your money or your legal position. Those chapters speak through pictures and questions, and where a real step is called for, the answer is a qualified person.

What it offers is a clear mirror. A first reading can bring relief, as if someone had named, without fuss, a brightness long excused. If that is your experience, stay with it a moment. The old commentators call 丙 the fire of pure Yang (純陽之火), and they did not mean it as flattery.