The Dew and the Rain

The character

癸 (guǐ) is the tenth and last of the heavenly stems, a Water stem of Yin polarity. Its pair is 壬 (rén), Yang Water. If 壬 is the great river and the sea, then 癸 is the water that comes in small amounts and from above: the dew on a leaf at six in the morning, the mist over a pond, the drizzle that nobody carries an umbrella for, the damp that gathers on a cold window. It is the last stem of the ten, and the old order of things reads that as a meaning. After 癸 the cycle starts again with 甲, the seed. Water is what stands between the end of one round and the beginning of the next.

The classic that readers of BaZi still quote on the ten stems is the Dī Tiān Suǐ (滴天髓), "Dripping Heavenly Marrow". The verse it gives 癸 runs to eight lines, quoted here as the edition with Ren Tieqiao's commentary (滴天髓闡微) prints them, with a translation made for this book.

癸水至弱，達於天津。 得龍而運，功化斯神。 不愁火土，不論庚辛。 合戊見火，化象斯真。

Gui Water is weak in the extreme, yet it reaches the Ford of Heaven. Let it meet the Dragon and it travels, and its work of change becomes divine. It does not worry about Fire or Earth, and it takes no account of the Metals Geng and Xin. Joined to Wu and meeting Fire, the picture of change comes true.

Take the lines in pairs. Two commentaries travel with the verse: an older set of notes printed with it (原注, "the original notes") and the commentary of Ren Tieqiao (任鐵樵). On several lines they disagree, and where they do, both are given here.

Lines one and two: faint, and yet it reaches the sky. 至弱 means "weak in the extreme". The commentaries do not soften it. The original notes call 癸 Water at its purest Yin (陰之純), and Ren Tieqiao adds that it is extremely weak in nature and most still in force (其性極弱，其勢最靜). A rain cloud has no edges, and a drop of dew can be flicked away with a finger. But 天津 (tiān jīn), the "Ford of Heaven", is an old name for a crossing on the river of stars, the Milky Way. The line says that this thinnest of waters reaches the sky. Mist climbs from the valley, becomes cloud, and comes back as rain. The weakest water is the one that travels farthest.

Lines three and four: the Dragon. 龍 is the Dragon, and the Dragon is also the branch 辰 (chén), the damp Earth of late spring and the storehouse of Water. In Chinese weather lore the dragon brings rain. The two commentaries read the line differently. The original notes take it as weather: with the Dragon the water rises to make clouds and rain (得龍以成雲雨) and moistens everything below, and they add that any Wood in a chart, 甲, 乙, 寅 or 卯, keeps the water moving. Ren Tieqiao reads it as a hint of change. For him the Dragon is simply the branch 辰, and meeting it is the moment when a stem combination shows what it would turn into (逢龍即化). The two readings meet in one picture: 癸 does its best work when something gives it a way to move, or a way to change.

Lines five and six: Fire and Earth, Geng and Xin. A weak water that does not worry about Fire sounds odd, and the commentaries explain it in two ways. The original notes say that Fire and Earth, however many, are not feared when Wood in the chart keeps the water moving. Ren Tieqiao gives a sterner reason: a water this weak does not fight a mass of Fire and Earth, it goes along with them (見火土多即從化矣). This book adds a picture of its own. Heat lifts 癸 as the sun lifts mist, and the water returns later as rain; the soil drinks the rain, and the rain has done what rain is for. The phrase 不論庚辛 divides the commentators too. The original notes say that 癸 neither relies on Metal to be born nor minds a great deal of it (不賴其生，亦不忌其多). Ren Tieqiao says that a water this small cannot carry the force of Metal away, as the great river 壬 can, and that much Metal only clouds it (金多反濁). The book will not choose between them. The practical point is that 癸 is not a stem that wins by being fed in bulk.

Lines seven and eight: the change into Fire. 合戊 means "joined with 戊". 戊癸 counts among the five classical stem combinations, and with its conditions met the pair is said to change into Fire. The verse says that, when the water joins Wu and Fire appears, the picture of the change is "true". Here the two commentaries part most clearly. The original notes are generous: whenever 丙 or 丁 shows on the stems, 戊 and 癸 can turn into Fire whatever their strength, even in autumn and winter (秋冬皆能化火). Ren Tieqiao is strict: in autumn and winter, with Metal and Water strong, the change hardly ever comes about, even with a 辰 below and Fire above (亦難從化). The other early edition of the text, the 滴天髓輯要, differs from this one in three places, and one of them changes the sense: it ends the verse with 火根乃真, "only a rooted Fire makes it true", which builds the same caution into the line itself. This book follows the strict reading, and Chapters 6, 9 and 10 come back to the conditions. For now it is enough to know that the verse on the gentlest stem ends on a change, and that its best-known commentator hedges that change with care.

The second picture

The website names 癸 by the water it shows first: dew, mist, rain. This book puts two pictures next to each other, because dew and rain are one water at two stages of its life.

Dew is the raw form. It forms in the dark and in stillness, on whatever is cool and open. It is quiet, small and wonderful to look at, and it is gone by noon. It has no force and does not need any. People who are like dew are often noticed late, when someone sees what the light was doing to a spider's web at dawn and asks who made it.

Rain is the mature form. It is the same water that has gone up, gathered and come down on purpose, and this time it reaches the field. Rain has direction. It falls where the ground is waiting. A farmer does not admire rain as a picture, and does not need to. The crop is the review.

Much of a 癸 life is spent passing from the first picture to the second. Dew is sensitive, private and perfect, and it evaporates before it has done anything. Rain is the same sensitivity given a destination and a season. When this book speaks of strength and price, of the Ten Gods and of the seasons, it keeps asking one question. Where is this water going?

Neither picture is the better one. Rain without dew has no stillness at all, and dew without rain is a lovely thing that nobody harvests. A person with this Day Master usually needs to be both, one before sunrise and the other after.

The pictures have old roots and one famous dissent. The original notes to the verse see the water rising into clouds and rain, and the seasonal classic 窮通寶鑑 calls the 癸 of the first spring month "the essence of rain and dew" (雨露之精). Ren Tieqiao objects that 癸 is not to be taken for rain and dew (癸水非雨露之謂): for him it is simply a water of pure Yin (純陰之水). This book keeps the dew and the rain as images that teach a temperament, and it never lets them define the stem; none of the rules in later chapters rests on them.

Where 癸 sits among the elements

Seen from 癸, the five elements stand in these relations.

Naming follows polarity. With a Yin Day Master like 癸, a stem of the same polarity gets the "indirect", "friend" or "eating" label, and a stem of the opposite polarity the "direct", "rob" or "hurting" one. So 辛 (Yin Metal) is the Indirect Resource and 庚 (Yang Metal) the Direct Resource. Every name in the table follows from this rule, and Chapter 3 is built on it.

Four readers

Four invented readers walk through this book. All four have 癸 as Day Master, and all four came into the world in different seasons. Their charts come from a solar-term calendar.

The rows run year, month, day, hour, in the same order as the four columns of the calculator from left to right. In bold stands the Day Master 癸, and under it the day branch, the home within the chart. You do not need to decode anything yet. Look at the general feel of each one. Eilidh's chart is full of Wood and almost empty of Water. Juma's is a Water crowd under a very hot sky. Wing-yee's has Metal on every side, and a quiet 戊 beside her. Reinaldo's is deep Water with one pale winter sun in the month. These four waters are very different, and later chapters show them answering the same rules in different ways.

A scene: the quay at six, the piano at ten

At six in the morning Eilidh stands at the end of a pier on the west coast of Scotland with a mug of tea and a printout of the day's sailings. The air is wet in the way that is neither fog nor rain. Her hair is damp and so is the paper. She runs the timetable for a small ferry company, and her real skill is that she feels a delay before the radio does: a change in how the skipper says good morning, a gull pattern, the sound the first van makes on the ramp. By seven she has moved two sailings, rung three people and told nobody how she knew. A colleague says "you always seem to know." She shrugs and says that the day told her.

At ten at night Reinaldo is tuning a piano in the front room of a house in Camagüey, a Cuban city where the summer rain comes every afternoon like a clock. The family has gone to the kitchen and left him the room. He has a felt strip, a lever and a lamp, and he has not spoken for forty minutes. A fine ear for beats between two strings is what he sells, and a customer once said that he hears the room as much as the instrument. Tonight he hears that the upstairs floorboard has a note of its own. He mentions it and the owner laughs, because nobody has ever listened to that floor.

Both scenes belong to one Day Master. Water with no edges goes to wherever there is a gap: the timetable, the string, the damp air of a Tuesday. Everything else in this book grows from that habit, and the next chapter asks what the habit costs.

What this book will not do

No page here says what will happen to you. The Ziping school of BaZi describes weather: which forces are present in a life, where they press and where they hold things up. A calendar of events is another kind of book. Phrases such as "the chart leans", "usually" and "often" are chosen on purpose.

You will not find counsel on body, money or legal affairs either. Where those subjects come up, the chapters use images and questions, and any practical step is for a qualified person.

A clear glass is what the book can offer. A first reading can startle a person with 癸: somebody has named, calmly, a quality they kept out of sight because it did not look like strength. If that happens to you, notice it. Faint is not the same as unimportant: the verse that calls 癸 the weakest of the waters also sends it to the sky.