How your child operate (Part 2)

In the previous article, we mentioned that parents can understand what the strengths of their child are using Bazi. For people who do not have any background knowledge in Bazi, they can read out the article named “Bazi Introduction” to have a better understanding on Bazi. We will delve straight to the main structure of the chart for the purpose of finding the strength or the strongest element of a person in this article. Below is a sample chart. The season of birth for this person is circled in red in the chart, which is spring, and wood will be the strongest element in spring.

 

Bazi of a person born on 14 Feb 2013, 12pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can also see that there are 2 more wood protruding on the heavenly stem as well. Therefore, it is no doubt that the wood element is the strongest element in this chart. And wood when referring to the 辛 xin metal Day master in the day stem is its wealth element. Element that is controlled by the Day Master will be its wealth element and it is metal controlling wood in this case. Therefore the structure or the strongest element in this chart is direct wealth as the 甲 (yang wood) is an opposite element for the yin metal Day Master. Please refer to the 10 gods table in Bazi introduction article if you are not familiar with this.

As an alternative, you can print out your Bazi chart from Joey Yap’s website where you can find out what your profile is straight away. Click here to print chart.
 

Please bear in mind that there are other things that influences how a person behave as well like the Day master (Who he/she is), useful god (the most important element that brings balance to the Bazi chart), etc. I will focus on the 10 profiles for the purpose of finding out how your child operates in this article, so that you can focus on the area where your child can perform best based on their strengths.

The 10 profiles

Direct Resource

Your child is quiet, cultured, likes learning. They think a lot, meticulous and therefore can be a good analyser.
 

Indirect Resource

A good observer, they like unconventional knowledge and do things uniquely. They have the ability to see things differently from others, and are usually quiet as well.
 

Direct Officer

Your child is a good follower who can follow rules and regulations. Set a clear target or rule with your child and guide them with frequent monitoring and assessment.
 

Seven Killings

Your child is brave and daring, like a warrior. They are straightforward and a doer. They can be in business expansion line to help fight for market share for their company. The only thing that needs to look into is they need to learn to be patience and think thoroughly before they act as their weakness is acting too fast and too direct.
 

Direct Wealth

Good at management especially in saving money for the company as they are very structured and aims to do things the most efficient way. This makes them the best manager material for a corporate.
 

Indirect Wealth

Your child is a natural-born entrepreneur. Train them in business related areas so that they can become a successful businessman/woman in the future, not to forget financial management training as they are quite poor with managing finances.
 

Eating God

Like an artist, they have plenty of ideas and good imagination. They can express their idea in words like a good writer, or in art like painting and fashion designing.  They enjoy beautiful things.
 

Hurting Officer

Your child likes the lime light or attention, and is a natural performer. Let them attend talent classes to find and learn what they really like and grow their natural talent. They can be a good speaker, dancer, actor, musician, sportsmen etc.
 

Friend

Friend is most important to them. They like to network and have many friends. Friend influence has the most impact on those with highest percentage in Friend profile. Make sure your child is surrounded by the type of friends that are positive minded and can motivate your child. You can enhance this by letting your child join clubs or society groups that are full with ambitious young people.  
 

Rob Wealth

If your child is having Rob wealth as the highest percentage in the 10 profiles, they are very competitive in nature, and like challenges and competitions. They like to be in groups, and is not a lone ranger. Put your child in a competitive environment where they have peers who fight along with them. They perform best under pressure.

 

The above are just some suggestions for the parents to understand their child more. This can be used as an additional piece of information for the parents to consider before deciding on anything for their child. As you can see from above, there are people who are extrovert, like to be seen, talk to and surrounded by people. There are also people who are introvert, who thinks a lot, are quiet and like to be alone. Please do not think that it is a disadvantage if your child is shy and quiet; they could be the best strategist or analyst in the future with appropriate guidance. You just need to focus on the key areas where their strength lies and grow the talent that is suitable for them. There is a Chinese saying that goes that there will be an expert in each and every different industries and fields.

The dream of unleashing your child’s full potential has never been easier if you can identify your child’s true potential and give them appropriate training and guidance to nurture their talent.
 

If you would like to know more on this, there are books by Joey Yap that talks about the 10 Day masters, 5 structures and 10 profiles that explain this in more details. Click here to visit Joey Yap’s Mastery Academy.

How your child operate (Part 1)

Many parents spend thousands of dollars on their child for tuition classes, talent classes, motivational classes and many more, with one intention, they want their child to be ahead of others and lead a successful life that they will be proud of.

For some parents, the outcome is quite desirable and encouraging, but there are many more parents that have been left with frustration and disappointment when things do not go as what they have planned it to be.

Why?

If we analyse the reasons why some of the efforts failed to materialized in the end, there are 2 key areas to look into as follows:

1)      Internal (self):

·        Feeling of boredom with the subject or class, due to lack of interest/passion/drive.

·         Feeling of fear and wanting to avoid facing reality when the child lacks the required strength/capability for the subject or class, or when the pressure they received from the parent or teacher has exceeded what they can tolerate.

·         Feeling of unfairness, where some child will purposely go against what their parents want them to do to draw attention from their parents as a sign of protest, usually when they are unhappy with certain things that their parents have done to them.

2)      External (Environment):

·         Problem with others like teachers and friends, e.g. Fear for a teacher causes unwillingness to attend classes taught by that teacher.

·         Peer influence. To some child, friends are their world; they will try their best to be like their friend in order to fit in.

So from what we can see above, in order to solve the problem from internal/the child, communication is crucial in finding out where the problem lies. Therefore, parents need to spend some time to talk, listen and understand what their child’s interest and strength really are, or try to guide them to find what they really want.  At the same time, parents should also not pressure their child as pressure will cause someone to lose appetite and interest in things that they are doing.

For external influence, if the reason is due to the quality of the teacher, the parents can try to change a new teacher for their child. That is the easiest solution among all problems identified here.

It is more difficult to solve problems cause by peer influence and it requires more time as well. Parents need to talk and explain to their child why they should not follow everything that their friends do. Try to justify everything you say and treat your child like an adult when you talk to them. You need them to respect you because you are right, not because you are forcing them using your authority as a parent.

Parents can also arrange their child to join healthy activities or society groups, which is another good way to avoid your child from mixing with bad companies as they now have more chances to mix with positive minded people.

All that I have mentioned above is the more traditional way to solve the problems faced by parents today, which is through communication. There are other ways to know what the strength of the child is and under what circumstances can they produce maximum performance. One of the ways is through Bazi or Four Pillar of Destiny Analysis (one type of Chinese Astrology). I will briefly talk about the 10 types of profiles with its strengths and weaknesses, and everyone will have 1 of the 10 profiles as their main trait, and some sub traits from the other profiles as well. As this is more technical, I shall discuss it in part 2 of the article. To be continued.

Mystery of Human Destiny

Many of us are curious about our destiny. Is our destiny fixed? Am I destined to be rich or successful? And if I am destined to be SOMETHING, can destiny be changed? Human nature tells us that people will happily believe in ‘destiny’ if what they have found out about their destiny is something good and smooth-sailing, while they tend to reject ‘destiny’ when it is not something positive. Is that the correct way of dealing with ‘destiny’?

There are many studies out there that can be used to predict the outcome of a human’s destiny, and coincidently (note that some believes that there is no coincidence in life), I have gotten the chance to learn more about Bazi / Four Pillars of Destiny Analysis, which is one type of destiny analysis methodology in Chinese Astrology, when I was trying to understand myself more.

Before being exposed to Bazi, being a Chinese, my only exposure to Chinese Astrology is through the Chinese Zodiac annual readings based on animal signs of the year that I was born in. The years were divided into 12 animal signs, and there will be prediction on luck capacity of the year for each of the 12 animal signs every year by various masters, which is a famous topic especially during Chinese New Year. Back in those days, I have always found it fun and entertaining even though the accuracy of the forecast is not high.

After I began to learn Bazi, I am finally able to understand why the annual forecast based on the 12 animal signs is not very accurate. This is because in Bazi (which is also known as the four pillar of destiny), we use not only a person’s year of birth, but the month, day and hour of birth as well! There will be an animal sign for each one of them. For example, a person who was born at 12pm on the 14th of February in 2013 will have the following Bazi animal signs:

1)      The year 2013 is a Water Snake year, of which is written as 癸巳 in Chinese.

2)      The month and day for 14 Feb in 2013 is Wood Tiger (甲寅 )and Metal Pig (辛亥) respectively.

3)      And the Hour of birth at 12pm is represented by Wood horse (甲午)

Bazi of a person born on 14 Feb 2013, 12pm

Hour	Day	Month	Year
甲 Jia	辛 Xin	甲 Jia	癸 Gui
Wood	Metal	Wood	Water
午 Wu	亥 Hai	寅 Yin	巳 Si
Horse	Pig	Tiger	Snake

 

There are all together 4 different animal signs for this person, namely the snake, the tiger, the pig, and the horse, while the annual forecast for the 12 Chinese Zodiacs is only referring to the snake sign for the year. Notice that this corresponds to only 1 of the 8 characters in a Bazi as per shown in the table above, and this causes the animal sign forecast to be less accurate because the other 7 characters has an impact to our life as well. By the way, a direct translation of Bazi into English means Eight Characters. 

Based on these 8 characters, there would be hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of Bazi that we can get. Thus, for entertainment purposes for the mass market and due to time and cost constraint (the annual predictions are normally given free), it is only commercially viable to do a prediction for just the year animal sign for which there are only 12 signs.

By combining all these 8 characters or 4 pillars (each pillar consists of 2 characters, one sitting on top of another. We have the Year Pillar, Month Pillar, Day Pillar, and Hour Pillar), analysis can then be performed to access the interactions between the 4 pillars. Based on the analysis, we could derive and understand who the person is and how their life will generally be like. Further analysis on the interaction between the 4 pillars and the current time period would allow us to understand how well the person will do in this period, or how well their luck / opportunity is during this period.

There is this concept that nothing is permanent in our world; there will be a life cycle for everything. People tend to say that what goes up, must come down or vice versa. For the share market, the difference is the time factor; some fluctuate in days or months, but some cycle has period in years or even longer. For our lives, the same fluctuating cycle is applicable. From the moment that we were born, we will go through lots of ups and downs in our life and this is what we call the luck cycle.

In the past, people recognize Bazi or Chinese Astrology as a means of ‘fortune telling’.  But in the modern context, people use this information to gain an advantage by being able to see the ‘big picture’ of their lives well in advance, thereby allowing them to plan ahead and capitalize on the good times and be prepared and minimize the losses during the bad times. It also helps to save valuable time as some people may spend years exploring what they really want in lives by going round in circles without achieving anything. As ‘time’ is a constraint for everyone, knowing what to do and the right time to do it will definitely leads you to the pathway for success.

Bazi Introduction

In order to allow the reader to understand and appreciate the technical articles in this site, we have prepared a brief introduction for readers who may not have any background knowledge on this subject at all. Hopefully, this helps and more people can know and appreciate the ancient art of our Chinese culture. 

Everything in Bazi is revolved around the 5 elements and its interaction with one another. Therefore a good understanding of the basics will take you a long way for the learning and understanding of Bazi. It will be very useful as well if you advanced further into other subject of Chinese Metaphysics like Fengshui (the study of Qi and landform) as they also uses the concept of five elements.

The five elements are namely metal, water, wood, fire, and earth. The basic relationship between the five elements are categorised into producing cycle, weakening cycle, and controlling cycle.

The producing cycle

 

Water produces wood: Water grows wood just like plants need water to grow.

Wood produces fire: We burn wood to produce fire.

Fire produces earth: Fire burns everything into ashes and returns it back to the earth. Earth can be referred to as soil, sand, dust, or ashes.

Earth produces metal: Metal refers to the natural minerals that grow in the earth.

Metal produces water: Metal does not really produce water but attracts water during its condensation process.

The weakening cycle

 

 

 

The five elements are weakened by element that they produce or grow, just like a mother is weakened after giving birth to her child. Therefore, metal weakens earth, earth weakens fire, fire weakens wood, wood weakens water, and water weakens metal.

The controlling cycle

 

 

 

Metal controls wood: As wood can be chopped down by axes which is made by metal.

Wood controls earth: The earth or soil is held together by the trees.

Earth controls water:  Just like the river or ocean which is contains/bounds the earth.

Water controls fire: Water can extinguish fire.

Fire controls metal: Fire is used to melt metal.

The Ten Stems/Ten Day Master

The five elements can be broken down into what we called ten stems by assigning a yin or yang polarity to each of the elements.

The Day Master is referring to the Day stem of a Bazi chart, which is circled in red in the chart below. As there are only ten different stems (yin and yang polarity of each of the five element), therefore we have ten Day Masters.

Day Master is very important in the chart as it represents the person, the ‘self’. What the rest of the 7 characters in the chart means will be derived by their relationship with the Day Master. 

 

 

Table 5: 10 Day Master table

Element	10 stems	Image	Description/Key characteristic
Wood	Yang Wood 甲 Jia		Big and tall trees. Benevolence, Straight forward, likes stability
	Yin Wood 乙 Yi		Twine and bushes. Flexible, adaptable
Fire	Yang Fire 丙 Bing		The Sun. Energy, passion, generous
	Yin Fire 丁 Ding		The light of candle. Meticulous, sentimental, motivator
Earth	Yang Earth 戊 Wu		Rocks, mountain. Loyal, dependable, trustworthy
	Yin Earth 己 Ji		Soil, dirt. Nurturing, productive, resourceful
Metal	Yang Metal 庚 Geng		Axe. Righteousness, power, fighter
	Yin Metal 辛 Xin		Jewelry. Elegant, attention-grabber, negotiator
Water	Yang Water 壬 Ren		Water in the ocean. Wisdom, adaptive, constant movement.
	Yin Water 癸 Gui		Mist, cloud. Mysterious, intuition, creative

 

Relationship with other element

Element that you (The Day Master) control is your wealth element

Element that controls you (The Day Master) is your influence element

Element that you (The Day Master) produce is your output element

Element that produces you (The Day Master) is your resource element

Element that is the same as you (The Day Master) is your companion element

 

Day master Element	Wealth element	Influence element	Output element	Resource element	Companion element
Wood	Earth	Metal	Fire	Water	Wood
Fire	Metal	Water	Earth	Wood	Fire
Earth	Water	Wood	Metal	Fire	Earth
Metal	Wood	Fire	Water	Earth	Metal
Water	Fire	Earth	Wood	Metal	Water

Table 6: Five elements relationship with the Day Master

The Ten Gods

The Ten Gods are derived when you further breakdown the five elements from table 6 above into yin and yang polarity.

10 Day master	Wealth element		Influence element		Output element		Resource element		Companion element
	Direct Wealth	Indirect Wealth	Direct Officer	Seven killings	Eating God	Hurting Officer	Direct Resource	Indirect Resource	Friend	Rob Wealth
甲 Yang Wood	己 Yin Earth	戊 Yang Earth	辛 Yin Metal	庚 Yang Metal	丙 Yang Fire	丁 Yin fire	癸 Yin Water	壬 Yang Water	甲 Yang Wood	乙 Yin Wood
乙 Yin Wood	戊 Yang Earth	己 Yin Earth	庚 Yang Metal	辛 Yin Metal	丁 Yin Fire	丙 Yang Fire	壬 Yang Water	癸 Yin Water	乙 Yin Wood	甲 Yang Wood
丙 Yang Fire	辛 Yin Metal	庚 Yang Metal	癸 Yin Water	壬 Yang Water	戊 Yang Earth	己 Yin Earth	乙 Yin Wood	甲 Yang Wood	丙 Yang Fire	丁 Yin fire
丁 Yin Fire	庚 Yang Metal	辛 Yin Metal	壬 Yang Water	癸 Yin Water	己 Yin Earth	戊 Yang Earth	甲 Yang Wood	乙 Yin Wood	丁 Yin Fire	丙 Yang Fire
戊 Yang Earth	癸 Yin Water	壬 Yang Water	乙 Yin Wood	甲 Yang Wood	庚 Yang Metal	辛 Yin Metal	丁 Yin Fire	丙 Yang Fire	戊 Yang Earth	己 Yin Earth
己 Yin Earth	壬 Yang Water	癸 Yin Water	甲 Yang Wood	乙 Yin Wood	辛 Yin Metal	庚 Yang Metal	丙 Yang Fire	丁 Yin fire	己 Yin Earth	戊 Yang Earth
庚 Yang Metal	乙 Yin Wood	甲 Yang Wood	丁 Yin Fire	丙 Yang Fire	壬 Yang Water	癸 Yin Water	己 Yin Earth	戊 Yang Earth	庚 Yang Metal	辛 Yin Metal
辛 Yin Metal	甲 Yang Wood	乙 Yin Wood	丙 Yang Fire	丁 Yin fire	癸 Yin Water	壬 Yang Water	戊 Yang Earth	己 Yin Earth	辛 Yin Metal	庚 Yang Metal
壬 Yang Water	丁 Yin Fire	丙 Yang Fire	己 Yin Earth	戊 Yang Earth	甲 Yang Wood	乙 Yin Wood	辛 Yin Metal	庚 Yang Metal	壬 Yang Water	癸 Yin Water
癸 Yin Water	丙 Yang Fire	丁 Yin fire	戊 Yang Earth	己 Yin Earth	乙 Yin Wood	甲 Yang Wood	庚 Yang Metal	辛 Yin Metal	癸 Yin Water	壬 Yang Water

Table 7: The Ten Gods

Strength of elements in a chart based on season

Element	Spring	Summer	Autumn	Winter
Wood	Prosperous	Weak	Dead	Strong
Fire	Strong	Prosperous	Trap	Dead
Earth	Dead	Strong	Weak	Trap
Metal	Trap	Dead	Prosperous	Weak
Water	Weak	Trap	Strong	Prosperous

Table 8: strength of elements based on season

The twelve Earthly Branches

People are familiar with the twelve animal zodiac signs that are associated to each year. For example, 2013 is a snake year. The table below shows the five elements that the animal sign contained. Determining the strength of the element will be based on the season that the person is born in, which is the same way as determining the strength of the stems’ element (Please see table 8 above)

Spring
Feb	Mar	Apr
寅 Yin Tiger	卯 Mao Rabbit	辰 Chen Dragon
甲 Yang Wood 戊 Yang Earth 丙 Yang Fire	乙 Yin Wood	戊 Yang Earth 乙 Yin Wood 癸 Yin Water
Summer
May	Jun	Jul
巳 Si Snake	午 Wu Horse	未 Wei Goat
丙 Yang Fire 庚 Yang Metal 戊 Yang Earth	丁 Yin Fire 己 Yin Earth	己 Yin Earth 乙 Yin Wood 丁 Yin Fire
Autumn
Aug	Sep	Oct
申 Shen Monkey	酉 You Rooster	戌 Xu Dog
庚 Yang Metal 壬 Yang Water 戊 Yang Earth	辛 Yin Metal	戊 Yang Earth 辛 Yin Metal 丁 Yin Fire
Winter
Nov	Dec	Jan
亥 Hai Pig	子 Zi Rat	丑 Chou Ox
壬 Yang Water 甲 Yang Wood	癸 Yin Water	己 Yin Earth 辛 Yin Metal 癸 Yin Water

Table 9: 12 earthly branches table by season. The small character in bold indicates the strongest main qi for the respective animal sign.

We will use the table below to show how the season of birth can determine the strength of all the elements in the chart.

 

 

Table 10 shows that people who were born in Feb will have a tiger sign as their month branch. This also indicates that the strongest element in the chart will be wood element as he/she is born in spring. The strength of each element in the chart can be determined by using table 8 above (e.g. In spring: wood prosperous, fire strong, water weak, metal trap, and earth dead).

After knowing what the element in your chart means to you and the strength of the element, you can know what your basic strength is and where your weaknesses lie. All this takes time and practice to master, but Bazi is definitely something worth investing for in your life.

I will stop here for the time being, and will come back to explain a little bit more when new concepts are introduced in other articles. If you want to learn more, you may also buy books like ‘The Destiny code’ and ‘The Destiny code revealed’ written by Master Joey Yap of the Mastery Academy, which is simple and easy to understand, and suitable for beginners who would like to know more about Bazi.