The Ten Gods (십성, sipseong) are how a saju chart actually turns into meaning. Every stem and branch around your Day Master relates to you in one of ten ways — as a wealth, officer, output, resource or peer star — and the mix of those stars is what tells you whether your chart leans toward money, career, expression or support. This guide explains all ten in plain English, and you can label your own chart free in about a minute.
Your saju has eight characters, and the day stem is you — the Day Master. The other seven characters, plus the hidden stems inside the branches, are not "you"; they are relationships to you. The Ten Gods are simply the names for those ten possible relationships. They are not deities — the word "god" here is a translation of sin (神), meaning a force or star, not a being to worship.
The ten split into five pairs, one pair for each way an element can relate to your Day Master through the Five Element cycle of producing and controlling. Within each pair, one version shares your yin-yang polarity (the indirect, more variable type) and one is the opposite polarity (the direct, steadier type).
| Family | Relationship to you | What it governs |
|---|---|---|
| Peer (비겁) | Same element as your Day Master | Independence, siblings, rivals, competition, self-reliance |
| Output (식상) | The element you produce | Expression, creativity, skill, speech, children for some charts |
| Wealth (재성) | The element you control | Money, assets, results, and a partner in some charts |
| Officer (관성) | The element that controls you | Career, discipline, reputation, rules, pressure, status |
| Resource (인성) | The element that produces you | Support, study, knowledge, nurture, documents, protection |
| Ten God | Korean | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Companion | Bigyeon (비견) | Same-polarity peer — independence, a steady sense of self. |
| Competitor | Geopjae (겁재) | Opposite-polarity peer — drive, rivalry, sharing and spending. |
| Expression | Siksin (식신) | Direct output — calm talent, craft, enjoyment, steady creativity. |
| Performance | Sanggwan (상관) | Indirect output — bold expression, wit, breaking convention. |
| Direct Wealth | Jeongjae (정재) | Steady money — salary, savings, careful management. |
| Indirect Wealth | Pyeonjae (편재) | Big or fast money — ventures, windfalls, generous spending. |
| Direct Officer | Jeonggwan (정관) | Honor and order — career, reputation, responsibility, rising through structure. |
| Indirect Officer | Pyeongwan (편관) | Pressure and power — challenge, authority, decisive action under stress. |
| Direct Resource | Jeongin (정인) | Nurture and learning — study, support, trust, gentle protection. |
| Indirect Resource | Pyeonin (편인) | Unusual insight — intuition, niche knowledge, independent thinking. |
You do not memorize ten random labels — each one follows from one comparison. Take any element in your chart and ask how it relates to your Day Master:
Then split by polarity: same yin-yang gives the indirect type, opposite gives the direct type. That is the whole system — five relationships, doubled by polarity, making ten.
A chart is rarely read by one shining star. What a reader looks at is the overall distribution: which families are crowded, which are empty, and whether that suits your Day Master strength. A heavy stack of Officer stars on a weak Day Master can feel like constant pressure; the same stack on a strong one can read as natural leadership. This is why the Ten Gods are always read together with whether your chart is strong or weak, and with your useful element (yongsin).
Honesty matters. Knowing your stars will not guarantee wealth, force a career, or fix a relationship by itself. The Ten Gods are a centuries-old language for describing tendencies — where your energy naturally flows and where it runs thin. Read that way, paired with your timing, they are one of the clearest and most practical tools in saju, not a fortune that decides things for you.
It is a strong clue, not the whole story. A dominant Output star often points to an expressive, creative person; a dominant Officer star to a disciplined, status-aware one. But your Day Master element, its strength, and the supporting stars all shade the picture, which is why two people with the same top god can still feel quite different.
A pile-up of one family intensifies that theme but can also tip it out of balance — too many Wealth stars can scatter focus across money, too many Resource stars can lean toward overthinking. Excess of a good thing is read with the same caution as a shortage, which loops back to your chart's useful element.
Your birth chart's gods are fixed, but each ten-year luck cycle and yearly pillar brings in new characters that carry their own gods. A year flooded with Officer stars can foreground career and pressure even for someone whose birth chart is light on them, which is why timing is read alongside the chart in the daewoon cycle.
Right here. The free Cheonmyeongdang calculator turns your birth date and hour into your four pillars and tags every stem and branch with its Ten God in plain English — the whole map of your stars in one view.