The Candle and the Lantern

The smallest fire you can carry

A candle is the smallest fire a person can carry across a room, and the easiest one to lose. Walk too fast and the flame leans over and shrinks. Open a door and it shivers. Yet in the same room, at the same hour, a single candle will do something the sun cannot: it makes the table in front of you into the only place in the world. The book is lit, the cup is lit, the face across from you is lit, and everything else steps back into the dark.

That is the stem this book is about. 丁 (dīng) comes fourth among the ten heavenly stems. Its element is Fire and its polarity is Yin. Across from it stands 丙 (bǐng), Yang Fire, the sun: the same element, the opposite temper. 丙 shines on everything alike, from far away, whether anyone asked or not. 丁 is near. It is the lamp on the desk, the stove in the corner, the coal under the ash, the small light people gather around because it is small enough to gather around.

Nothing in the system ranks the two. The sun is the great giver of daylight and the candle is the thing that makes night habitable, and a person with 丁 as their Day Master is built for the second task.

What the old verse says

The Dī Tiān Suǐ (滴天髓, "Drops of Heaven's Marrow") is a classical Ziping text. Tradition links it with the name of Liu Ji, though its real authorship is uncertain, and generations of later commentators have annotated it. This book follows the edition with the commentary of Ren Tieqiao (任鐵樵), the 滴天髓闡微. The text gives each of the ten stems a short verse. The verse for 丁 has eight lines of four characters, read as four couplets. Here it is in full, with our own translation.

In plain words, a couplet at a time.

Soft and centred, clear and bright within (丁火柔中, 內性昭融). Fire is the hot element, so the verse spends its first breath on a surprise: this one is gentle. 柔中 joins softness to the middle way. The old note printed with the verse reads it as a fire that, being soft, keeps to the mean, and Ren Tieqiao adds that for this reason 丁 has neither too much nor too little. 昭 is a clear light that shows things as they are. 融 is light at its full glow, the same character as in 祝融 (Zhù Róng), the old name of the fire spirit, and in everyday modern Chinese it also means to melt. The old note sums up the couplet as gentle and yielding outside, bright and refined within, and Ren calls that inner brightness the image of 文明 (wén míng), a word that joins pattern and light and has come to mean culture. A person with 丁 is often described as quiet on the surface and very much alive underneath, and the verse treats that as the nature of the stem, no accident of upbringing.

Holding Yi in its arms, loyal when joined with Ren (抱乙而孝, 合壬而忠). Two relationships are named. 乙 is soft Wood, a twig, a grass stalk, a wick, and as the Indirect Resource it stands to 丁 as a mother. The verse calls the flame dutiful toward it, and the old note explains the duty as protection: 乙 fears 辛, the knife of Metal, and 丁, the fire that melts Metal, holds 乙 close and keeps the knife away, where the blazing 丙 would burn up its own mother, 甲. 壬 is Yang Water, and 丁 and 壬 form one of the five classical stem combinations. The old note calls 壬 the rightful ruler of 丁 (正君), the Direct Officer, and finds the loyalty in protection again. 壬 fears 戊 Earth, and 丁 keeps 戊 from bullying it: outwardly 丁 soothes 戊, which it feeds, and inwardly the 丁壬 bond leans toward Wood, the element that holds Earth in check. Ren Tieqiao sums up the couplet in two short clauses: openly, the flame keeps 辛 from harming 乙, and quietly, it keeps 戊 from harming 壬. Both lines are about bonds, and in both the virtue is a guard kept over someone else. A candle is not a solitary object. It needs something to burn and something to answer to, and the verse praises it for watching over both.

Strong without fierceness, thin without ending (旺而不烈, 衰而不窮). Many fires, when strong, become a blaze, and when weak, go out. The verse says 丁 refuses both stories, and Ren Tieqiao ties the couplet back to the first line: because 丁 is soft and keeps to the middle, at the height of its season it does not blaze, and in its decline it does not go out. At full strength a candle still gives a candle's light, steady and local. At its thinnest it may be an ember, and the verse says that even then it is not at its end. This pair of lines explains why the book spends so little time on the question of whether a 丁 is "strong" or "weak" as a verdict. The swing is real, and so is the staying power.

If it has its true mother, it can stand autumn and winter (如有嫡母, 可秋可冬). Autumn belongs to Metal and winter to Water. Both are cold seasons for a fire. 嫡母 is the principal mother of a household, the true mother as against any other, and the old note names her. It says plainly that 乙 is not the true mother of 丁, and that a 丁 born in autumn or winter needs only one 甲 to lean on and not go out. 甲 is the Direct Resource, large dry Wood, the timber that burns long and slowly; the 乙 of the second couplet is the other mother, loved and guarded, but not the one the cold seasons call for. Ren Tieqiao widens the line a little: with Wood on the stems, 甲 or 乙, an autumn 丁 need not fear Metal, and with 寅 or 卯 among the branches, a winter 丁 need not fear Water. Either way the rule is fuel against the cold, with 甲 first. With 甲 in the chart, a candle can go through the two hard seasons without going out. The line is the practical key to the whole stem. It reappears in the Ten Gods (Chapter 3), in the seasons (Chapter 8) and in the six day pillars (Chapter 9).

One honest word about the picture before the book uses it. Calling 丁 a candle is an old habit. The seasonal manual Qióng Tōng Bǎo Jiàn (窮通寶鑑) quotes a rhyme that names 丁 a single candle lamp (丁火陰柔一燭燈), and the Sān Mìng Tōng Huì (三命通會) likens it to a lamp fed with oil. Ren Tieqiao rejected such comparisons. 丁, he wrote, is not to be taken for a lamp or a candle (丁非燈燭之謂); it is simply softer and more centred than 丙. Elsewhere in the same book he calls the long custom of giving each stem a fixed object a great error (大謬) when it is used to read a chart. So the candle and the lantern in this book are teaching pictures: images of a temperament, of soft and centred fire, and never a definition of the stem. Neither picture means that 丁 is small or weak by nature: in its own season the verse calls it strong, only never fierce.

The first picture: the candle

Think of an open flame on a plain dish. It is generous and bright, and it bends in every draught. People walk past it and the light leans toward them. A door opens in the next room and it shivers. Somebody sets down a cup and the whole flame tilts. It needs no instruction to give light, and it has no wall to keep it from being put out by whatever comes by.

This is the first picture of 丁, the one most popular descriptions of the stem begin with: perceptive, responsive, easily moved, warm to whoever is in front of them. The gift is that rooms go quieter and kinder when this person enters. The price is that the same person is moved by everything, and the flame can spend a whole evening leaning toward other people's weather without ever standing upright.

The second picture: the lantern

Now put the same candle inside a paper lantern. Nothing about the flame has changed. It is the same small fire on the same wick. But the paper does three things at once. It breaks the draught, so the flame can stand. It spreads the light into a soft glow instead of a point, so more of the room is lit. And it gives the light a handle, so it can be carried to the next room, the next village, the next road.

A lantern is a made thing. Somebody chose the paper, cut the frame, set the wick. In a human life that corresponds to what 丁 builds around its own gentleness: a craft, a routine, a set of friendships with clear edges, a habit of saying "not tonight" in a kind voice. It is the same person with the draughts handled. In human terms the lantern is the flame meeting the world on purpose.

Neither picture is a verdict. A candle without a lantern burns brightly and briefly. A lantern with no flame is paper and sticks. Much of what follows asks one question, in many forms: what is the paper around your light, and who made it?

Where 丁 sits among the elements

Fire generates Earth and is generated by Wood. It melts Metal and is quenched by Water. Seen from 丁 in particular:

For a Yin Day Master like ours, a stem of the same polarity takes the "indirect", "friend", "eating" or "killings" name, while a stem of the opposite polarity takes the "direct", "rob" or "hurting" name. So 乙 (Yin Wood) is the Indirect Resource and 甲 (Yang Wood) the Direct Resource, and Water divides the same way: 癸 is the Seven Killings and 壬 the Direct Officer. Chapter 3 keeps returning to this table.

Four readers

Four invented readers walk through the book, one for each season of birth. Each has 丁 as the Day Master. Two more join them in Chapter 9, so that every one of the six Ding day pillars has someone to stand beside.

The rows run year, month, day, hour, in the same order as the four columns of the calculator from left to right. The bold 丁 is the Day Master, the person at the centre of the chart. Beneath it sits the day branch, which stands for the home and the nearest partner. None of this needs decoding yet. Look for the general feel. Nuria's chart is a thicket of Wood with Fire inside it. Hossam's is a room already full of Fire, three branches deep. Pei-Shan's has Metal in command and a 壬 on the year that both of her 丁 could reach only across a gap. Étienne's is a winter chart with one warm stem, 丙, and one tree, 甲, standing guard in the year pillar.

A scene: the room at nine in the evening

Nuria is thirty-nine and runs the lighting for a small theatre company in Valencia. At nine in the evening the house lights are down and the stage is a dim blue square. She sits at the back of the hall with a headset, calling the cues in a voice so low the actors say they can feel it rather than hear it. Every few minutes she says "go" and the world changes colour. Afterwards three of the actors will each say, separately, that she was the only person in the building who knew what the scene needed. She will say she just watched.

At the same hour in Cairo, Hossam, twenty-six, is bent over a bench in an alley workshop, soldering a joint on a tin-and-glass lantern. He is an apprentice to a master who makes the festive lanterns people hang in the streets. His job is the quiet one: the small seams that nobody photographs. He does them slowly, and he can tell a bad seam by the sound of the tin as he presses it. When the master leaves the shop, Hossam turns the little oil lamp inside one finished lantern up a notch, only to see how the glass takes the glow.

Both of them are tending light for other people. Both are asked, now and then, whether they would rather be in the front. This is 丁 in everyday dress, and it is the subject of the next chapter.

What this book will not do

Do not expect a forecast. The old Ziping books did try to read events; this book uses BaZi more narrowly, to name climate. It names the forces in a life, the places where they lean hard and the places where they hold something up. Since no calendar of happenings is on offer, the verbs here are careful ("often", "usually", "can"), and the care is deliberate.

Health, money and legal questions are outside its remit too. Wherever a chapter drifts toward them it gives an image or a question, and a decision that really matters belongs with a professional.

At best it works like a clear pane of glass held up to you. Reading about your own stem may come as a relief: here is a gentleness you were once told to toughen up, described without any fuss. If that is what you feel, give it a minute. Eight lines of old verse were written for 丁, and not one of them asks it to be harsher.