Gui (癸) is the tenth and last heavenly stem, the yin form of Water. If Gui is your Day Master, it is the stem above your day pillar — the reference point for reading everything else.
Gui Water is the Yin form of Water, one of the ten Day Masters. New to this? Start with what a Day Master is and how it is calculated.
Gui is water without volume: dew, mist, rain, groundwater. It arrives quietly, goes everywhere, and changes things over time rather than at once. Nothing about its method is forceful and almost nothing about its effect is temporary.
Gui is the most perceptive of the ten stems in the specific sense of reading situations without participating in them. It frequently understands the dynamics of a room fully and says nothing, partly from discretion and partly because the conclusion seems too obvious to state. Its intelligence is cumulative and its influence is indirect.
The difficulty is visibility and self-assessment. Gui charts often show someone who did the work that made an outcome possible and was not present when it was attributed, and who has quietly concluded from this that they are less capable than louder people. Rain does not need to envy the storm; it also should not pretend it did not fall.
Water is produced by Metal and controls Fire; Earth controls it and Wood drains it. For Gui this means Metal is support, Fire is wealth, Earth is pressure and authority, and Wood is expression. Gui interacts with Earth differently from Ren: dew is absorbed by soil rather than dammed by it, so what reads as restriction in a Ren chart often reads as depletion in a Gui one.
These relationships are the Ten Gods (十神). They are not personality labels — they describe what another stem does to your Day Master when it appears in your chart. This table is generated from the same function the chart tool uses, so it matches what the calculator would tell you.
| Stem | Relation to Gui Water | What it does to Gui Water |
|---|---|---|
| Jia Wood 甲 | Hurting Officer 傷官 | dew and rain outputs Wood sharply — brilliance that cuts. |
| Yi Wood 乙 | Eating God 食神 | dew and rain outputs Wood easily — talent that flows. |
| Bing Fire 丙 | Direct Wealth 正財 | dew and rain works Fire steadily — earned in proportion to effort. |
| Ding Fire 丁 | Indirect Wealth 偏財 | dew and rain works Fire in lumps — windfalls, not salary. |
| Wu Earth 戊 | Direct Officer 正官 | Earth shapes dew and rain — structure you accept. |
| Ji Earth 己 | Seven Killings 七殺 | Earth cuts at dew and rain — pressure that asks no permission. |
| Geng Metal 庚 | Direct Resource 正印 | Metal feeds dew and rain steadily — support and schooling. |
| Xin Metal 辛 | Indirect Resource 偏印 | Metal feeds dew and rain unevenly — sideways insight. |
| Ren Water 壬 | Rob Wealth 劫財 | Water of the other polarity beside dew and rain — money leaves through people. |
| Gui Water 癸 | Friend 比肩 | A true peer for dew and rain; a rival for the same ground. |
What each of the ten relations means in general — Direct Wealth, Seven Killings, Hurting Officer and the rest — is set out in the Ten Gods glossary.
Classical BaZi grades a stem by the season it was born into — the 旺相休囚死 scale. Water peaks in winter, is supported in autumn, and is at its weakest in the Earth months when Earth dams it.
| Birth season | Grade | What it does to Gui Water |
|---|---|---|
| Spring (寅卯辰 · Feb–Apr) | 休 Resting | Rain into growing ground. Quietly productive, and quietly used up. |
| Summer (巳午未 · May–Jul) | 囚 Confined | Dew in heat. Gui is at its most stretched here — small volume against a strong season. |
| Autumn (申酉戌 · Aug–Oct) | 相 Supported | Metal condenses moisture. Well-supported and clear; Gui's most self-possessed season. |
| Winter (亥子丑 · Nov–Jan) | 旺 Peak | Peak, but frozen. Strength is present and largely static until Fire warms it. |
Water corresponds to Blue / black, the numbers 1, 6, and the direction North. These are traditional correspondences for the element itself. They are not a prescription — whether Water is helpful to you depends on your whole chart, not on your Day Master alone.
5 May 1992, born in Hong Kong, birth time unknown — day pillar 癸巳 (Gui Si).
The day stem is 癸, and the birth month is 巳 — early summer, when Water is confined and Fire is strengthening. Water is stretched here; Metal as a source matters more than usual. Because the birth time is unknown, the hour pillar cannot be set, but the Day Master itself is still reliable: the day pillar only becomes uncertain for births near 23:00, when the late Zi hour would advance it.
How the day pillar is derived — solar terms, true solar time and the late Zi hour — and what a Day Master cannot tell you on its own, are covered on what is a Day Master.
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