The River and the Sea

The character

Stand on a bridge at dusk and watch a wide river go under you. It does not hurry and it does not stop. Somewhere upstream it was a thread of melt on a mountain, and somewhere downstream it will be the sea. That moving body of water is 壬 (rén), the ninth of the ten heavenly stems. It belongs to Water and carries the Yang polarity. Its sister is 癸 (guǐ), Yin Water: rain, dew, mist, the water you can hold in a cup. 壬 is the water you cannot hold. It is the river, the lake, the tide, the ocean.

On the ten stems, the book people open first is the Dī Tiān Suǐ (滴天髓), which means "Drops of Heaven's Marrow". Its verse on 壬 has eight lines. Here they are in Chinese, with a translation made for this book:

壬水通河，能泄金氣。 剛中之德，周流不滯。 通根透癸，沖天奔地。 化則有情，從則相濟。

Ren Water runs through to the great river, and it can draw off the breath of Metal. Its virtue is firmness in the middle: it moves all the way round and does not stagnate. With roots below and 癸 showing above, it storms up to the sky and rushes over the ground. If it transforms it has feeling; if it follows, the two help each other.

Here is each couplet in plain words.

The first couplet. 壬 is water that reaches the main channel, the river that other waters feed into. The old commentators read 河 here as the Heavenly River (天河), the Milky Way, and place its mouth at the branch 申, where 壬 is born and where Metal rules. Metal gives birth to Water in the five-element cycle, so ore, steel and stone are its mothers, and the verse says 壬 can take Metal's hard breath and carry it off. Think of a stream running over gravel: the stone stays stone, and the water leaves with a cargo of grit and mineral. A person with this Day Master often has this knack of taking something rigid, a rule, a stubborn colleague, a heavy subject, and putting it into motion. Editions differ on this first line. The text translated here follows the edition with Ren Tieqiao's commentary (滴天髓闡微); the 滴天髓輯要 prints 壬水汪洋, "Ren Water, wide as the open sea", a reading close to the second picture of this book.

The second couplet. "Firmness in the middle" is a picture older than BaZi. In the Book of Changes the trigram for water (坎) has a solid line between two broken ones: soft outside, hard in the core. Water gives way around every stone, and its direction does not change. 壬 can bend through a hundred valleys and still be going to the same sea. "Does not stagnate" is the other half. The old texts like Water that moves. A river that stops becomes a swamp.

The third couplet. Roots below mean Water in the branches (子, 亥, 申, 丑, and the water store of 辰). A 癸 showing on top is a second Water, the rain on the river. Together they make a flood: "up to the sky, over the ground". This is the power of the stem and also its danger. Nobody stands in front of a river in spate and gives it advice, and the commentary says the same in its own terms: when 申, 子 and 辰 are all present and 癸 shows on top, even 戊 and 己 cannot stop the water, a dam forced on it only makes it burst, and the way is Wood, which drains the flood along its own course.

The fourth couplet. This one is read in more than one way, and teachers differ on how often it applies. The commentaries take "transforms" (化) to mean the stem combination that 壬 forms with 丁 (the combination is taken up in Chapters 6 and 11): when the conditions are right, the pair turns to Wood, the Wood in turn feeds the Fire of 丁, and the bond is said to have feeling. "Follows" (從) is used for a Day Master with almost no root. The commentary pictures a 壬 born in the summer months among strong Fire and Earth, with no Metal or Water to help it: the water goes along with the strongest force, and the old note adds that the summer air, steamed with its water, turns into rain and dew, so even then each side helps the other. Both cases are rare. Most people with 壬 are simply 壬, and the rest of this book assumes so.

Two pictures: the river and the sea

The website names this Day Master the great river. This book keeps that picture and sets a second beside it, because a single picture lets a stem off too lightly.

The river is the form of 壬 in motion. It has a source and a bank, a current and a bed. It is quick, it carries, it cuts channels through whatever stands in the way. A river is also restless: it is always on its way to somewhere else, so it rarely rests where it is. Its flood is the flood of a person who says too much, spends too much, loves too hard, starts five things in a week.

The sea is the same water arrived. It has taken in a hundred currents and does not argue with any of them. Ships move on it, tides move under it, and the full moon makes it rise. Nobody has to tell the sea to be generous or to be patient. It is simply large enough that single events do not shake it.

These two are teaching images, and the commentator whose edition this book translates is blunt about the limits of such pictures: Ren Tieqiao found 壬為江河, Ren as the great rivers, among the stock comparisons of the fortune-tellers' rhymes, and wrote that to read a fate through them is 大謬, a great error. So the river and the sea, like the lamp and the dike that later chapters give to other stems, describe a temperament here and never define the stem.

A good part of a 壬 life is the passage between the two pictures, from the first to the second: from the fast, forceful river to the wide, calm water that other people can build on. The old texts want a river with banks (the Earth stems) and a source (Metal), and when the water runs very high they want a channel (Wood) to take the surplus. This book adds a third wish, a sea to reach, which is the broad final stretch of a life. Whenever the next chapter weighs strength against price, the question underneath stays the same: where is this water heading, and what keeps it in its bed?

How the sea is made

The sea is not given to anyone, and it does not arrive on a birthday. The old note printed with the verse does give 壬 a destination: it calls 壬 the water of Kunlun, the western mountain where the great rivers rise, and 癸 the water of Fusang, the eastern sea where 壬 comes to rest, and it says the two divide and join and cannot be split apart. How a person makes that passage the old texts leave unsaid, and the reason is plain: it is built out of habits. A river becomes sea-like when it learns three things.

The first is to take in without being changed. A person who has heard a hundred confessions and still has a steady voice has learned it. The second is to hold a level. A sea has a surface that tides do not break, and a person who can be in a crowded room without losing their own weather has found that surface. The third is to let ships pass. The sea does not own the ships, and it does not ask where they are going. A person who reaches this third habit stops trying to manage everyone else's voyage and finds there is more room.

None of the three is a talent. All three can be practised, and the chapters that follow return to them in the form of banks, sources and slow hours.

Where 壬 sits among the elements

Every element in BaZi nourishes one neighbour and holds another in check. Standing in the current of 壬, the five look like this:

The naming rule is short. Where a stem shares 壬's polarity, it takes the "Indirect", "Friend", "Eating God" or "Seven Killings" name; where it has the opposite polarity, it takes the "Direct", "Rob Wealth" or "Hurting Officer" name. That is why 壬 and 癸, though both are Water, are not twins in the table: 癸 is Rob Wealth and only a second 壬 is Friend. Fire works the same way, with 丙 (Yang) as Indirect Wealth and 丁 (Yin) as Direct Wealth. The table above is the ground that Chapter 3 stands on.

Six readers

Six made-up readers travel with you through these pages. All of them have 壬 as Day Master, and each sits at a different point of the year. The first four, one per season, come back in most chapters.

Read down the rows and you meet the pillars as the calculator lays them out across the screen, left to right: year, month, day, hour. In every column the bold 壬 marks the Day Master; the branch under it is the seat of home and of the closest partner, which Chapter 5 calls the spouse palace. Sindre (壬辰) and Salma (壬戌) join them from the next chapter, and their full portraits come in Chapter 9. No need to decode anything yet; take the general feel. Delroy's chart is a frozen lake with two small flames on its shore. Nimali's holds one drop of Water in a land of Fire and Earth. Bálint's is ringed by Metal, with a single lamp (丁) at the hour. Bronwyn's is a river cutting through a wood.

A scene: the bridge at dusk

Delroy is fifty-nine and drives a delivery van for a firm of bakers in Kingston. At four every morning he is first on the road, and by noon he has talked to forty people, most of whom he will see again tomorrow. He knows which gate-man has a sick child and which shopkeeper is quietly angry about the new parking rules. On Sundays he drives out to the coast, parks on the same bridge and watches the water. His wife has stopped asking what he is thinking about. He is thinking about nothing, and it is the best hour of the week.

Bronwyn at sixty-eight keeps the books for a veterinary practice outside Bendigo and has been asked to retire twice. Both times she offered to teach the replacement, and both times the replacement stayed three weeks. Her desk faces the window, and the creek behind the car park rises after rain. She says she can tell the weather by how loud it is.

One of them is a river still carving its bed, and the other is a river that has long since joined something larger. Same stem, two different stretches of water. The next chapter looks at what the stem gives and what each gift costs.

What this book leaves out

A river is not a forecast, and this book does not pretend otherwise. BaZi in the Ziping tradition is a way of describing water levels: which currents are strong in a chart, where they lean on the banks, where the ground holds. It does not list what will occur in your life. When a sentence says "often", "usually" or "the chart leans", the softness is deliberate.

Nothing here replaces a professional for your health, your savings or a legal question. Where those subjects come up, the pages work with pictures and with questions to ask yourself, and when something practical must be done, the right person to ask is a licensed one in your own country.

What the book can offer is a still stretch of water to look into. A first reading can feel like relief, when a trait you had counted as a defect is named plainly and without drama. If it happens to you, linger there for a minute. The old texts count Water first among the five elements (一曰水, "the first is Water"), and they did not mean it as a courtesy.