Terminology Directory

The Day Master (Ri Zhu) is the central coordinate in a Bazi chart. It represents the "Self" and the foundational element of the chart owner. Other elements are interpreted in relation to it.

Seven Killings (Qi Sha, or Indirect Officer) is one of the more forceful and challenging Ten Gods. It represents pressure, ambition, competition, risk, and disruptive power.

Yong Shen (Useful God) is a core concept in Bazi. It names the element or star a traditional reader treats as most helpful for balancing the overall chart.

The Hurting Officer represents overwhelming talent, pride, rebellion, and the destructive power to break traditional conventions.

The Eating God is a gentle and generally favorable star representing culinary enjoyment, longevity symbolism, artistic appreciation, and pure, unforced expression.

The Direct Officer represents discipline, rules, reputation, official status, and in a female chart, the traditional husband.

The dual nature of money: Direct Wealth represents stable, hard-earned income; Indirect Wealth represents speculation, big investments, and sudden windfalls.

Peach Blossom represents intense interpersonal attraction, aesthetic charm, and uncontrollable romantic encounters. It is the most famous symbolic star (Shen Sha) in Bazi.

Represents knowledge, education, the mother, and protective barriers. Direct Resource is orthodox knowledge; Indirect Resource signifies intuitive genius, esoterica, and paranoia.

The amplification of ego. Represents peers, competitors, and partners. It brings independence while acting as a double-edged sword for wealth retention.

The temporal engine of destiny. The Bazi chart is the static factory specs of a car; the Decade and Annual Pillars are the actual road conditions determining the ride.

The four Earthly Branches: Chen, Xu, Chou, Wei. They function bilaterally as dark tombs burying decayed elements, or as vaults securing stored resources and wealth.

A highly intense Shen Sha. It is symbolized as a sharp blade, representing strong execution, conflict, and elevated risk at the same time.

The gearbox for geographical displacement. Signifies non-stop traveling, relocating, immigration, job transfers, and sometimes kinetic accidents.

The Eight Trigrams (Bagua) are the fundamental structural units of the I Ching, each composed of three Yin or Yang lines representing the eight primordial forces of nature: Heaven, Earth, Thunder, Water, Mountain, Wind, Fire, and Lake.

The Yang line (⚊, solid) and Yin line (⚋, broken) are the most fundamental elements of the I Ching — the binary "0" and "1" of cosmic encoding. Their permutations generate the entire system of Changes.

Every hexagram in the I Ching is composed of an Upper (Outer) Trigram and a Lower (Inner) Trigram. The lower represents the internal situation and self; the upper represents the external environment and others. Their interaction forms the first layer of hexagram interpretation.

The Nuclear Hexagram (Hu Gua) is a "hexagram within a hexagram" extracted from lines 2-3-4 and 3-4-5 of the original, revealing hidden dynamics and potential turning points beneath the surface of events.

The King Wen Sequence is the classical ordering of the 64 hexagrams attributed to King Wen of Zhou, from Qián (Hexagram 1) to Wèi Jì (Hexagram 64), encoding a complete philosophical narrative of "creation, development, culmination, and inevitable renewal."

The Yarrow Stalk Method is one of the most representative traditional I Ching casting techniques, using 50 yarrow stalks through three rounds of division to mathematically determine each line's Yin/Yang nature and Old/Young state, with a probability distribution that differs from the coin method.