The Stone and the Jewel

The character

The eighth heavenly stem is 辛 (xīn). Its element is Metal and its polarity Yin, and its partner in the set of ten is 庚 (gēng), Yang Metal. Picture 庚 as the axe, the lump of ore, the sword resting on the anvil. 辛 is metal that has already been taken in the hand: a ring, a needle, a watch spring, the clasp of a necklace and the gem set in the clasp. It is smaller than 庚 and finer, and it asks to be looked at closely.

The Dī Tiān Suǐ (滴天髓), a classical text that readers of BaZi still quote, gives one short poem to each stem. This is the poem of 辛, in eight lines, as it stands in the edition with Rèn Tiěqiáo's commentary (滴天髓闡微); the other common edition reads the same:

辛金軟弱，溫潤而清。 畏土之疊，樂水之盈。 能扶社稷，能救生靈。 熱則喜母，寒則喜丁。

Here is our own rendering, line by line.

Xin metal is soft and slight, warm and moist, and clear. It dreads earth piled up in layers; it rejoices when water is full. It can hold up the altars of a state; it can rescue living souls. In heat it welcomes its mother; in cold it welcomes Ding.

The poem is a portrait in four pairs, and each pair says something different.

The first pair is the material. 軟弱 (ruǎn ruò) means soft and weak, and nobody has to take it as an insult. Next to 庚 the word describes the difference between a blade and a gem. 溫潤 (wēn rùn) is the word used for jade: warm, a little damp, pleasant under the thumb. 清 (qīng) is clarity, the clean quality of water in a glass or of a note struck once and left to ring. Put together, the first pair describes a person who is gentle on the surface and exact underneath, and whose presence feels clean.

The second pair is the weather this metal likes. A jewel dreads being buried. 畏土之疊 (wèi tǔ zhī dié) is the picture of earth laid on earth, one heavy layer after another, until the stone cannot be seen or felt. In a life the layers are duties, moods, other people's expectations, the weight of a house full of obligations. 樂水之盈 (lè shuǐ zhī yíng) is the opposite picture: water in plenty, running over the stone, taking the dust away. A washed gem shows its colour. A person with this Day Master often feels most like themselves after something has been released, whether that is a good talk, a good cry, a swim or a piece of music.

The third pair is the surprise. After two lines about softness the poem says that 辛 can hold up the altars of a state (社稷, shè jì) and rescue living souls. Both old commentaries read these lines through the bond between 辛 and the bright sun 丙, the combination 丙辛 that we meet in later chapters. They call 辛 the minister of 丙 and the ruler of 甲, the tall tree. As minister, the soft metal binds the sun and keeps its fire in order, and that steadies the state. As ruler, it keeps the same fire from burning the tree, and that rescues the living. A looser, modern way to hear the lines is that fine things, handled well, serve great ends: a precise instrument in a surgeon's hands, a seal on a treaty, a coin that everyone trusts. Either way, the small and the refined carry more of the world than they are credited with.

The fourth pair is the temperature rule. In summer heat 辛 welcomes its mother, the Earth that gives birth to Metal. Both commentaries name the damp 己 earth, which dims the fire and keeps the metal alive. In winter cold 辛 welcomes 丁, the small steady fire of a lamp or a hearth, which warms without melting. The note under the poem explains the choice: a winter 辛 that meets the sun 丙 instead is drawn into the combination 丙辛, which, one edition adds, turns toward Water in the cold, while 丁 takes the chill off the water and feeds the metal. Another classic, a season manual, gives 丙 a larger place in winter, and Chapter 8 sets the two views side by side. This is the first time we meet the old idea of 調候 (tiáo hòu), temperature balance: keeping the climate of a chart from running too cold or too hot.

The stone next to the jewel

The BaZi Cards website calls 辛 the jewel. This book puts a second picture beside it, because a jewel alone sounds like a finished thing, and nobody is born finished.

A stone is what 辛 looks like at the start. It is a gem still sitting in its rock, with earth around it and over it. There is quality inside, and no one sees it, perhaps including the owner. Children with this Day Master often feel the first picture before they have words for it: a sense of being worth more than the way the world has treated them so far, together with a fear that the sense is wrong. The stone is patient and also sore, because everything that presses on it leaves a mark.

A jewel is the same material after someone has cut it, washed it and set it in a place where light can reach it. The cutting hurts, in the way of any training. The washing is the 樂水之盈 of the poem, the release that lets colour appear. The setting is a decision about where this person shines: which room, which work, which company. The cutter's craft fits the poem: water washes the stone, and in the cold a small, steady fire keeps the bench warm. A furnace is another matter. An old verse on 辛 in the Yuān Hǎi Zǐ Píng (淵海子平) says that this metal is finished without the labour of a fierce fire (成就不勞炎火煆), and the jewel's tools are the gentle ones.

A good part of a 辛 life is the road from the first picture to the second. The stone asks Does anyone see what I am? The jewel asks a better question: Where do I want to be seen, and by whom? Later chapters on strength, work and closeness keep coming back to that second question, and to the plain fact that a jewel can be cut badly as easily as well.

Neither picture is better than the other. A stone with no cutter stays buried and bitter. A jewel with no inner stone becomes decoration. The reader with 辛 usually needs both, the raw worth and the finished form.

The stone and the jewel are images to teach with, and the commentators of the Dī Tiān Suǐ make that point themselves. The note printed under the poem of 辛 begins 辛乃陰金，非珠玉之謂也, "辛 is Yin Metal, and the name does not mean pearls and jade", and Rèn Tiěqiáo, in his remarks on the ten stems, calls it a great error (大謬) to judge a life by such likenesses, 辛 taken for jewels among them. In this book the two pictures describe a temperament, and they never define the stem.

Where 辛 sits among the elements

BaZi sets the five elements in two circles, one of feeding and one of checking. From where 辛 stands, the ring looks like this:

The names follow one small rule, the same for every Day Master. A stem with the same polarity as the Day Master gets the Friend, Eating God, Seven Killings or an "indirect" name, and a stem with the opposite polarity gets Rob Wealth, Hurting Officer or a "direct" name. So the Yin Water 癸 is the Eating God and the Yang Water 壬 the Hurting Officer; the Yin Fire 丁 is the Seven Killings and the Yang Fire 丙 the Direct Officer. Chapter 3 stands on this table, and the same rule gives every name in it.

Four readers

Four invented people keep us company. Each is a 辛, each was born in a different season, and their charts were worked out on the solar calendar.

The pillars run from year to hour, in the same order in which the calculator at bazi.cards sets them from left to right. The bold 辛 marks the Day Master. Below it stands the day branch, the Day Master's seat and, in BaZi, the place for home and the nearest partner. Two more readers, Aino and Temuulen, pass through the early chapters, and Chapter 9 reads their charts, so that all six day pillars have a face.

For now you do not need to decode anything. Notice the general feel. Inês has two 卯 in the middle of her chart, and a single 酉 in her year pillar facing them like a blade. Cheikh has Fire and Earth stacked up, and a bright 丙 on his year stem. Rima has Metal all around her, five characters of it by the main-element count, and a lone 丙 on her hour stem. Camilo has Water in four places, the 子 of his year, two 亥 and the 癸 of his hour, and a crossed pair of 巳 and 亥 that seems to pull in two directions. These four are very different soils for the same jewel, and the rules of this book will give them different advice.

A scene: the bench at eight, the table at nine

Camilo is forty-one and cuts emeralds in a small workshop in Bogotá. At eight in the morning the bench lamp is on, the radio is off, and he is holding a rough stone at arm's length, turning it against the light. A colleague asks whether the crack he found is in the stone or in the surface. Camilo does not answer for almost a minute. Then he says it is in the stone, and he explains where it runs, and the colleague is a little amazed. He has been right about stones since he was nineteen. He is much less sure about what to say to his sister about their mother's flat.

At nine that evening, in Beirut, Rima, who is fifty-three, sits at her kitchen table with a ledger open. She audits the accounts of small firms, and tonight a client has handed her a folder of receipts that do not add up. She finds the error in twenty minutes, and the pleasure is large and private. Then she closes the folder, makes tea, and is aware, as every evening, of a tight and polished silence in her chest: the habit of keeping everything exactly as it ought to be, and the faint loneliness of being the one who notices.

This is 辛 in its everyday form: fine attention, a clean standard, a quiet sorrow when the standard meets people. The classical reader looks at the bench and the ledger and sees a jewel that is very good at seeing flaws in other things. The same reader asks, gently, who is allowed to see the flaws in the jewel.

What this book will not do

Nothing here can tell you what is going to happen. In this book BaZi describes the weather of a life, meaning which forces are present, where they press and where they hold, and events lie outside it. That is why the wording is guarded: "often", "usually", "the chart leans".

Nor does it advise on your body, money or legal affairs. Where those subjects come up it uses images and questions, and for anything practical it sends you to a qualified person.

What it can offer is a clear mirror. For a person with 辛 that mirror sometimes brings relief, because a fastidiousness long taken for a defect turns out to be described as a craft. If that happens to you, take note. The classical authors placed this stem beside the altars of the state, and politeness had nothing to do with it.