Your Day Master Came With a Poem
Every summary of the ten day masters looks much alike: a name, an element, three trait words, a caution. It is not wrong. It is clause one of a much longer piece of writing.
Each Stanza Has Eight Clauses
One short book in the Zi Ping tradition takes the ten stems in order and gives each a stanza: Di Tian Sui, 滴天髓. Every stanza runs to eight four-character clauses, so a stem gets thirty-two characters. The first is for Jia wood:
甲木参天，脱胎要火。春不容金，秋不容土。火炽乘龙，水宕骑虎。地润天和，植立千古。
Who wrote it is not settled. It goes out under an author nobody can trace, a commentary credited to a Ming official, and later notes by Ren Tieqiao, a Qing practitioner; the imperial bibliography dismissed the first two. What survives has a shape.
Needs and Intolerances
Sort the eight clauses by their work and only one says what Jia wood is. 甲木参天 — Jia wood reaches into open sky — is the description, and the whole of it.
The other seven come in four kinds:
- What it needs: 脱胎要火, just out of the ground it wants fire.
- What it cannot take, for spring and for autumn: 春不容金，秋不容土.
- Where it does better under extremes: 火炽乘龙，水宕骑虎.
- What a good outcome looks like: 地润天和，植立千古.
A trait table gives you clause one and goes no further. So the table reads as though it were about temperament, while the stanza is about terms. The four-way split is mine; no commentary states it.
The Animals Are Branches
Clauses five and six name a dragon and a tiger. Neither is ornament. The gloss tradition reads 龙 as 辰 and 虎 as 寅, and Ren Tieqiao’s note ties 辰 to stored water and 寅 to the place where Jia wood begins.
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The stanza for 乙 does the same: 跨凤乘猴 and then 骑马亦忧 — phoenix 酉, monkey 申, horse 午. The stanza for 丙 names 虎马犬乡, which is 寅午戌.
These poems cannot be read without the branches. Someone who knows the five and never learned the twelve takes the animals for decoration and misses the only concrete instruction in the stanza. The primer at AskingMing sets out both series.
Damp Earth Grows Metal and Dry Earth Ruins It
The stanza for 庚 calls metal the firmest of the ten, then reaches a clause about earth. I quote Ren Tieqiao’s gloss rather than the clause, because the earliest printed commentary and the editions read today reverse its two halves. His prose is stable across editions: 湿土能生金，燥土能脆金 — damp earth grows metal, dry earth makes it brittle.
Earth sits in both halves of that gloss unchanged, and it neither helps metal nor harms it. Wet earth helps, dry earth harms, and what separates the two has nothing to do with the metal. So the question which element is good for me has nothing left to stand on: an answer would have to name one particular earth in one particular chart and say what state it was in.
Solid Earth Fears Being Shaken
Compare the two earths. 戊 opens 戊土固重，既中且正, solid and heavy, centred and upright, and closes 若在艮坤，怕冲宜静: it dreads being stirred and wants to be left still. 己 opens 己土卑湿，中正蓄藏, low and damp, says 不愁木盛，不畏水狂 — no worry about thick wood or wild water — and then asks to be helped and propped.
The commentary narrows that boast at once: too much water and this earth is swept away. Both are still earth day masters, and the two stanzas face opposite ways: one toward holding still, one toward taking support. So I am an earth day master settles nothing, and the split sits in the classical writing rather than in any modern confusion.
The Stanzas Give No Total
Three limits deserve stating plainly. Who wrote the book cannot be settled. The stanzas list terms but give no procedure for putting them together, so commentators have argued for centuries about how much each term is worth. And they belong to explanation rather than calculation: nothing in them changes how a chart is cast.
Not every animal is fixed either. The closing stanza for 癸 says 得龙而运, the dragon again, and four commentators give four reasons for it. I have kept to the readings that agree.
The grid of trait words in the day master guide at AskingMing is a fair clause one, and the page says so itself, calling it a starting point that a full chart modifies considerably. The other seven clauses are for the rest of the reading to supply.
