The stem and its image
Jia is the first of the ten heavenly stems, and its classical image is the great tree. The whole temperament of the stem is held in that image.
A tree does not move. It takes a place, it holds it, and it grows in one single direction: upward. Jia describes that movement of growth which does not negotiate its heading. It is hard wood, the kind one builds a frame from, not the kind that coils around a support. It rises straight and does not bend.
From there comes the uprightness this stem is credited with. Jia goes to the point by the shortest road, says things as it sees them and puts up badly with detours. That frankness is not a tactic, it is the very shape of hard wood: it has no other way of growing.
From there comes its pioneering drive too. First of the series, Jia opens. It begins, it clears the ground, it takes the place nothing occupied yet, like a lone tree settling in before the forest.
And from there comes what the image does not hide: rigidity. What does not bend ends up breaking. A trunk that refuses any give resists as long as it holds, then snaps at once, with no intermediate stage. Jia knows the zone between holding and yielding rather poorly.
Then there is responsibility. The tree carries its branches, its foliage and whatever shelters underneath. The trunk that rises straight always ends up carrying something other than itself, and that weight is part of its portrait.
Element and polarity
Jia is Wood, in its Yang phase. Its twin is Yi, Wood in its Yin phase: two stems, one single substance.
Polarity states neither a gender nor a hierarchy. Yang and Yin are two phases of one movement, and neither is higher than the other. What they do is distribute one element into two forms that do not behave the same way.
With Jia, the Yang phase reads directly in the image. Wood takes its densest and most assertive form there: a vertical push, a structure that hardens with time, a substance that imposes its own direction instead of following the lie of the land. Where Yin Wood works with what it finds, Yang Wood establishes itself and makes room around it.
It is the same sap, taken from the other end.
Where it hides
A heavenly stem does not appear only in plain sight, at the head of a pillar. Every earthly branch shelters one or more heavenly stems, its hidden stems, which count in the reading of the chart without showing at first glance.
Jia hides in two branches.
In the branch Yin, that of the Tiger, it stands in first rank: it is the leading hidden stem of that branch.
In the branch Hai, that of the Pig, it stands in second rank, backing up another stem.
The consequence is concrete. A chart showing no Jia at all on its four visible stems can still contain some, as soon as one of these two branches figures in it. That is one of the reasons a chart is never counted on what shows.
As Day Master
The stem of the day pillar is the Day Master, the reference point from which the whole rest of the chart is read. To be born on a Jia day is to approach the eight characters from the great tree.
A Jia Day Master thinks in terms of direction. It knows where it is going, or is actively looking to know, and it moves that way as long as nothing breaks it. Frankness comes with it, and with frankness the discomfort in situations that call for tacking, for circling a subject or for saying something other than what one thinks.
It takes on the load willingly. The trunk carries: this Day Master often ends up in a position of holding something for others, and bears weight better than ambiguity.
Its difficulty is the exact other face of its strength. A tree does not fold back. Where supple wood would take the blow by leaning, Jia holds, then snaps. Giving way on the form without giving way on the substance is the proper work of this stem.
A useful reminder: the Day Master is not the year animal. BaZi is read on eight characters, and the yearly sign is only one of them.
Keywords
- Uprightness
- Growth
- Pioneer
- Rigidity
- Responsibility
