A 金 Metal Day Master and a 木 Wood Day Master
The first thing the tradition settles about two charts is not sentiment but direction: which way the traffic runs between the two Day Masters. Here it is 我剋 — you control them.
- First chart
- 金 Metal
- Second chart
- 木 Wood
- Relation
- 我剋 — you control them
The two Day Masters
The mechanism is 我剋 wǒ kè — you control them. Your Day Master is Metal; the other chart's is 木 mù, Wood, and Metal is the phase that cuts Wood. Whatever your Day Master controls sits in the 財 cái position, the wealth seat, and in a reading of two people that word is less about property than about what you handle as material.
《三命通會》 puts the tool and its wear in the same seven characters: 金能剋木，木堅金缺 — "Metal is able to control Wood; where the Wood is hard, it is the Metal that is chipped." Nobody reads the second clause. It is the more useful one, because it is the clause about you. The tradition will not call this an affliction, and the reason is a workshop reason rather than a moral one. Standing timber is bulk. It becomes a beam, a handle, a joint, a thing that holds a roof up, only through subtraction, and subtraction requires an edge. You are the edge in this pairing. The plan that gets tightened, the sentence that gets shortened, the sprawling idea that arrives at a form — that is your work, and the other person's growth, left to itself, would go on producing length without ever producing shape.
What they pay is being the material. Being addressed as something to be improved is wearing even when the improvement is correct, and Wood registers a declined suggestion somewhere near the body rather than in the argument. You will be experienced as accurate long before you are experienced as kind.
What you pay is 缺. Every cut takes edge off the tool. Judgement is not a stock you hold; it is spent in use, and it is spent fastest against a grain that will not part cleanly — the knot, the position they hold for reasons neither of you can quite articulate. Metal against hard wood does not fail loudly. It goes slightly blunt, and a blunt edge does not stop cutting, it simply starts tearing.
Something to check against last month rather than in principle. Count the objections you raised. Then count how many of them arrived carrying an alternative. The ratio between those two numbers is the whole of your position here.
Cast the chart this page describes
The four pillars, the Day Master, the five-phase count, the day’s almanac read against the chart and the true solar time working — about 2,700 words — are free and need no account. The chart is computed in the browser; nothing about the birth is sent anywhere.