The Ten Gods 十神
What the Day Master produces at matching polarity — called both the longevity star and the rank star, because it feeds Wealth and restrains the Killings at the same time.
| Term 十神 | 食神 — Eating God (shi shen) |
|---|---|
| Relation to the Day Master | 我生 · 阴阳相同 — produced by the Day Master, same polarity |
| Group | Output |
我生者，有子孙之义，故立名食神。食者，如虫之食物，盖伤之也。虫得食物则饱，人得食则益，被食则损造化。
What I produce carries the sense of children and descendants, so it was named the Eating God. Eating is like an insect eating a thing — it is, after all, damage to it. The insect that gets food is full; a person who gets food is the better for it, and what is eaten is the loss creation takes.
凡命遇财煞之地，食神旺相，煞被食制，不敢为祸，财被食生，充裕不竭，故食神一名寿星，一名爵星，良有以也。
Whenever a chart meets the ground of Wealth and Killings, if the Eating God is in its prime the Killings are restrained by it and dare do no harm, and Wealth is produced by it and is ample and unexhausted. So the Eating God is called the longevity star, and also the rank star — and with good reason.
The naming chapter is doing something careful here. It picks the word 食, eating, and then immediately concedes what eating is from the other side: 盖伤之也, it is damage. Output costs the producer. The Eating God is drain (泄气) before it is anything else, and the texts never pretend otherwise.
What earns it the two honorific names is a double function: it produces Wealth and it restrains Seven Killings. One relation that both generates income and neutralises pressure is unusual in a system built on trade-offs, which is why Zi Ping Zhen Quan opens its chapter with 食神生财，美格也 — Eating God producing Wealth is a fine structure.
Its named enemy is Indirect Resource: 食怕枭，逢枭则夺.
This is a lookup, not a judgement — it falls straight out of the element relation and the yin/yang match, and the table below is generated by the same function the chart calculator uses. Where the Day Master has its own essay, the name links to it.
| Day Master | This god is… |
|---|---|
| 甲 Jia yang Wood | 丙 — Bing |
| 乙 Yi yin Wood | 丁 — Ding |
| 丙 Bing yang Fire | 戊 — Wu |
| 丁 Ding yin Fire | 己 — Ji |
| 戊 Wu yang Earth | 庚 — Geng |
| 己 Ji yin Earth | 辛 — Xin |
| 庚 Geng yang Metal | 壬 — Ren |
| 辛 Xin yin Metal | 癸 — Gui |
| 壬 Ren yang Water | 甲 — Jia |
| 癸 Gui yin Water | 乙 — Yi |
Sources: 《三命通会》 (San Ming Tong Hui, Ming, 万民英) and 《子平真诠》 (Zi Ping Zhen Quan, Qing, 沈孝瞻 — the original text, without Xu Leyu's commentary). Every passage above is quoted from a local plain-text edition and verified character by character. Translations are ours; corrections are welcome.
Enter a birth date, time and longitude — the calculator returns the four pillars, the hidden stems, the nayin and the ten gods, with true solar time applied.
Open the chart calculator →正官 Direct Officer · 七杀 Seven Killings · 正印 Direct Resource · 偏印 Indirect Resource · 正财 Direct Wealth · 偏财 Indirect Wealth · 伤官 Hurting Officer · 比肩 Parallel · 劫财 Rob Wealth