A 木 Wood Day Master and a 水 Water 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 生我 — they generate you.
- First chart
- 木 Wood
- Second chart
- 水 Water
- Relation
- 生我 — they generate you
The two Day Masters
Before anything else, the direction: 生我 shēng wǒ — they generate you. The other chart's Day Master is 水 shuǐ, Water; yours is Wood, and Water is what Wood is made from. An element that produces your Day Master sits in the 印 yìn position, the seal — the tradition's word for backing, credentials, shelter, the thing that stands behind you and is not you.
《三命通會》 records the exchange with the cost attached to the correct party: 水能生木，木多水縮 — "Water is able to produce Wood; where the Wood is plentiful, it is the Water that is drawn down." Note who diminishes in that sentence. The whole of this pairing's difficulty is contained in the fact that it is not you.
Support of this kind is nearly invisible from the receiving side, and not through any fault of character. A tree does not experience rain as a favour. It experiences rain as conditions. Water arrives before you know you need it, so what reaches you is not a gift you can date and thank someone for, but a general absence of difficulty — the calls already made, the mood already smoothed, the objection already met somewhere out of your hearing. You are unlikely to be able to itemise what they have done, and they are unlikely to volunteer it. Your cost is subtler than ingratitude and the classics are precise about it. Water in excess does not nourish Wood, it lifts it: roots that never had to go looking for moisture never go deep, and a tree that floats is a tree with nothing under it. Support delivered continuously removes the one condition growth requires, which is having to reach. If you have noticed that you make fewer of your own arrangements than you did before this relationship, that is the mechanism, not a failure of will.
Their cost is exhaustion of a quiet sort. Producing is not free, and a person in this seat can go a very long time being drawn on without registering a complaint, because complaint is not what the position does.
Something to check rather than take on faith. Name the most recent thing they did for you that you did not ask for. If it takes more than a moment, that interval 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.