A 水 Water Day Master and a 土 Earth 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 剋我 — they control you.
- First chart
- 水 Water
- Second chart
- 土 Earth
- Relation
- 剋我 — they control you
The two Day Masters
The mechanism is 剋我 kè wǒ — they control you. Your Day Master is Water; the other chart's is 土 tǔ, Earth, and Earth is the phase that stops water. Anything controlling the Day Master takes the 官殺 guānshā seat, the officer, which in this tradition names constraint that has standing rather than injury done.
《三命通會》 states the exposure precisely: 水弱逢土，必為淤塞 — "Water that is thin, meeting Earth, is certain to be silted up." 淤塞 is not the word for a dam. A dam is an event you would notice. Silting is deposition — the slow accumulation of solid matter in a channel until the current, which never stopped trying, has nowhere left to go. Set against that is the reason the classics call control a use rather than a wound. The difference between a river and a marsh is a bank. Water with nothing holding it does not go further, it goes wider, and wide water arrives nowhere and stagnates. Everything you are able to reach depends on there being a shape to travel inside, and in this pairing the shape is another person: the fixed hour, the settled address, the arrangement that was agreed and is not being reopened. What restricts you is also what gets you anywhere, and both halves of that are true at once and always.
Your cost is silting, and it is undramatic by nature. No single arrangement here is unreasonable. They accumulate. A commitment settles, then a routine, then an obligation that came with the routine, and one year you find that every plausible route has a deposit across it and the whole of your considerable capacity for movement is being spent going round in the same small circuit.
Their cost is having to be the bank at all times, including the times they would rather be moving themselves, and being cast as the obstacle in every account of the relationship that either of you gives to anyone else.
Something you can check this week. Name a route out of your current arrangements that is genuinely still open — one you could take within a month without anybody's permission. If you cannot find one, the silting is the reading.
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.