The Tree and the Beam

The character

甲 (jiǎ) opens the list of the ten heavenly stems. Its element is Wood, its polarity Yang, and its partner is 乙 (yǐ), Yin Wood. Where 乙 is the vine, the grass and the flower that bend with the wind, 甲 is the one that does not bend easily: the trunk, the great tree, the forest seen from a hill. The old texts put 甲 at the head of the whole list: a verse on the stems kept in the Yuanhai Ziping (淵海子平) opens with 甲木天干作首排, "Jia Wood is set first among the heavenly stems". The picture explains why. Before anything else grows sideways, something has to grow up.

The Dī Tiān Suǐ (滴天髓), the classic most often quoted on the ten stems, gives each of them a short poem. The poem for 甲 has eight lines. This series prints the stem poems from the text that Ren Tieqiao (任鐵樵) annotated line by line, the 滴天髓闡微:

甲木參天，脫胎要火。 春不容金，秋不容土。 火熾乘龍，水宕騎虎。 地潤天和，植立千古。

Here it is in plain English, line by line, in our own words.

Jia Wood climbs to touch the sky. To leave its seed-coat behind, it needs Fire. In spring it has no room for Metal, in autumn it has no room for Earth. When Fire blazes, ride the Dragon. When Water surges, mount the Tiger. Where the ground is moist and the sky is mild, it stands planted for a thousand years.

甲木參天 (jiǎ mù cān tiān). The tree reaches the sky. The word 參 means to rise level with, to stand beside. This is the whole stem in four characters: height, a single line, the upward habit. Someone born under this stem tends to feel the pull of the straight line before the pull of the crowd.

脫胎要火 (tuō tāi yào huǒ). 脫胎 means to slip out of the womb, to leave the shell. A tree is a seed that has left its shell, and it leaves it by warmth. Fire is the element that Wood gives birth to, the flower, the fruit, the lit window of a house built from timber. The original note printed with the poem (原注) calls Fire the child of Wood and says that a thriving Wood which meets Fire flourishes all the more (旺木得火而愈敷榮). Ren Tieqiao adds the seasons: a tree of early spring is tender and cold and comes into leaf with warmth, and a tree at the height of spring should let its finest strength out. Read for a person, the line says that Jia Wood shows its talent when it has Fire to give itself to: a voice, a craft, a body of work. A tree that never flowers is a post.

春不容金 and 秋不容土. On these two lines the old books do not speak with one voice. The original note says that in spring the Wood overbears Metal and so has no room for it, and that in autumn Metal is helped along, so the Wood has no room for Earth, the element that feeds the Metal. (The other common edition, the 滴天髓輯要, has the spring Wood feeding Fire instead of overbearing Metal; the Metal fares no better.) Ren Tieqiao gives the reasons in full. Metal is out of season in spring and weak, and struck against a trunk at its height it is the axe that chips: 木堅金缺, hard wood, notched metal. Autumn Earth is drained by the Metal it feeds and lies thin, and soil that thin cannot bank the roots of a tree whose strength has drawn down into them; it caves in under them. The seasonal manual Qiongtong Baojian (窮通寶鑑) reads spring another way and asks for 庚 to carve a strong spring tree into a beam. This book takes the lines as Ren reads them, as warnings about timing: Metal that is out of season in spring, and soil too thin to hold the roots in autumn. Chapter 8 follows them through the year.

火熾乘龍 (huǒ chì chéng lóng). When Fire blazes, ride the Dragon. The Dragon is the branch 辰, damp Earth that holds a little water and a little Wood in its belly. Ren Tieqiao names the case: the branches hold the whole Fire frame 寅午戌 and 丙 or 丁 shows above, so the tree is drained and even set alight. Such a tree should sit on 辰, the storehouse of Water, whose damp soil feeds Wood and draws off the Fire. A tree in a scorching summer wants wet ground under it. The line names one of the six Jia day pillars, 甲辰, which has its own section in Chapter 9.

水宕騎虎 (shuǐ dàng qí hǔ). When Water surges and tosses, mount the Tiger. Ren's case is the mirror image: 申子辰 complete and 壬 or 癸 on top, water flooding and wood afloat (水泛木浮). The Tiger is 寅, the first month of spring, the branch where 甲 itself sits as the main hidden stem and where a little warmth waits behind it. Ren calls it the birthplace of Fire and Earth and the seat where Wood draws its salary (祿), a branch that can take the water in. A tree in a flood wants a seat that holds. This line, too, names a day pillar of this book, 甲寅. (The 滴天髓輯要 writes 水蕩 for 水宕; both words mean water running wild, and the sense does not change.)

地潤天和, 植立千古 (dì rùn tiān hé, zhí lì qiān gǔ). The ground is moist and the sky is mild. Ren Tieqiao spells the condition out: Metal not too sharp, Earth not dry, Fire not fierce, Water not wild (金不銳，土不燥，火不烈，水不狂). Then the tree is planted and stands for a thousand ages. It is the old picture of a Wood in balance, and for a reader it works as a short test of a chart: where is the ground, and where is the weather?

The tree on the cliff

Look at the cover. An old pine stands on a rock above a sea of mist. Nobody planted it there, and nobody waters it. It has been in the wind for centuries and has taken the shape of the wind without giving up its line. You could say that the pine has answered a question the lowland trees never had to answer: how much of me stays upright when everything pushes?

That is 甲 in its first picture. The tree is alone, tall, direct, proud of its height, and unwilling to stoop. It leads because it is in front, and it is seen from far away. Wherever it grows, other plants arrange themselves beneath it.

The beam in the house

A lone tree, however grand, holds up nothing. The old language has a second picture for the same Wood: 棟梁 (dòng liáng), the ridge-pole and the cross-beam, the timber that carries the roof. A tree becomes a beam when it is felled, trimmed, measured and set into a frame where its straightness holds up other people. It gives up some of its freedom and its crown, and in return it is something that families sleep under.

The long walk of 甲 runs from the cliff to the frame, out of the first picture and into the second. The tree on the cliff is who 甲 is at the start: upright, free, sure of its own height. The beam is who 甲 can become: the same straightness, set in a structure where it carries weight for others and is carried by the structure in turn. The verse on the stems in the Yuanhai Ziping puts both ends of that walk into a single couplet: 斷就棟樑金得用，化成灰炭火為災. Cut and fitted as a beam, it is put to use by Metal; burnt down to ash and charcoal, it is undone by Fire. Whenever this book weighs strength against its price, it comes back to a single question. What is this timber holding up, and did it choose the roof?

Neither picture is better. A tree that never becomes a beam is admired and unused. A beam that forgets it was a tree can feel like a post in someone else's house. The reader with 甲 usually needs both.

One honest note about both pictures. Ren Tieqiao complains of verse-writers who liken each stem to an object, and the first likeness on his list is this book's own, 甲 as the ridge-beam (以甲木為梁棟); to read a chart through such likenesses, he says, is a great error (誠大謬也). So in this book the tree and the beam are drawings on a teacher's board: they show a temperament, and they do not say what 甲 is.

甲 in the ring of the elements

The five elements feed one another in one cycle and restrain one another in a second. From 甲's side of the ring, one sees them arranged like this.

A small rule governs the names in the last column. A stem that shares 甲's Yang polarity takes the first name of each pair (Friend, Eating God, Indirect Wealth, Seven Killings, Indirect Resource), and a stem of Yin polarity takes the second (Rob Wealth, Hurting Officer, Direct Wealth, Direct Officer, Direct Resource). So 丙, a Yang stem beside 甲, becomes the Eating God, and 丁, a Yin one, the Hurting Officer; likewise 壬 is the Indirect Resource and 癸 the Direct Resource. Chapter 3 leans on this table throughout, and every name in it follows from that one rule.

The six readers

Six made-up people walk through the book, each with 甲 as the Day Master. Four of them, one for each season, come back in most chapters. Luana and Karthik are glimpsed now and then before Chapter 9 and are met in full there, so that each of the six Jia day pillars has company. The charts are worked out on the solar calendar; the people are made up.

The pillars run down the table in the order the calculator at bazi.cards shows them from left to right: year, month, day, hour. The Day Master is the bold 甲. Beneath it sits the day branch, the seat of the household and of the closest partner.

Do not decode anything yet; just get the feel of each chart. Niamh's chart has a 庚 sitting directly beside her 甲, an axe next to a tree. Chidi's is packed with Earth, a dry summer yard. Joon-ho's is full of Metal and has almost no Fire in it. Sigrún's is mostly Water, with the Metal that feeds it, a tree standing in a flood. One kind of trunk stands in four very different weathers, and in later chapters the same rules play out differently in each.

A scene: seven-forty at the school gate

Niamh is sixty. At seven-forty on a wet morning in County Mayo she is standing at the gate of the primary school she has run for twenty-six years, in a yellow coat, saying the name of every child as the car doors open. A parent is waiting to complain about the new reading scheme. A teacher is waiting to say she has been up all night with her father. The caretaker has a question about the boiler. Niamh has an answer ready for each, and each answer is short and straight.

Ask her about her day and she will say that it is grand. Ask her what she would do with a free month and she will look at you as if you had asked what she would do with an extra leg.

This is 甲 in its everyday form: the person who stands where it can be seen, takes the weather first, and makes a line the others can follow. The classical reader looks at that gate and sees the tree with the whole village beneath it. Everybody shelters, and the tree is not asked what it needs.

The same morning looks different in Chidi's life. He is forty-seven, a structural engineer in Lagos, and at the building site in Lekki he is the man whom the site foreman calls before calling anyone else. If he says a column is wrong, the column is taken down. If he says nothing, nobody sleeps. He keeps the habit of being right the way some people keep a car, spotless and expensive. He rarely says "I do not know yet". Later, in the car, with the engine off, he practises the sentence.

A tree stands, and everyone can see it standing. That is the first and simplest fact about 甲, and the next chapter asks what the standing costs.

What this book leaves alone

This book will not say what is going to happen to you. BaZi in the Ziping tradition describes the climate of a life: which forces are about, where they press, where they steady you. Its language is made of pictures, and a diary of future events would be another book. The hedges you meet, "often", "usually", "the chart leans", are there deliberately.

It gives no advice on health, money or law either. Where those subjects come up, the text offers pictures and questions, and it falls to a qualified person to name any practical step.

The book can offer a plain mirror. Readers with 甲 often find the first look a relief: a quality they half-suspected was a fault has been named without fuss, and the straightness they were scolded for as stubbornness turns out to be timber. If that is your reaction, stay with it a while. The classics put 甲 at the head of the list, and when the Sanming Tonghui (三命通會) names that place it names the character with it: Yang Wood, humane by nature, first of the ten stems (甲，陽木也，其性仁，位處十干之首).