Di Tian Sui 滴天髓 · Chapter 14 · Translation and Commentary
剛柔論
Everyone agrees that firmness and yielding must complement each other; this chapter is about how badly that advice is usually applied. Its claim is that a remedy aimed at the label — firm or yielding — instead of at the element's actual disposition will reinforce the very excess it was meant to relieve. For anyone judging a Day Master in practice, it is the sharpest warning in the 滴天髓 against mechanical correction.
七月 and 八月 are lunar-month markers, not Gregorian months: 七月 is the 申 month, the first month of autumn, where Metal is already at its peak, and 八月 is 酉. The examples depend entirely on this. Only in 申 does Geng Metal arrive overfull, so that Ding Fire, Yi Wood, Ji Earth and Gui Water can each feed the excess rather than relieve it; read 七月 as “July” and the sequence becomes arbitrary.
Both verbs say what a good remedy does to 情 — the element's actual disposition. 引通 is to lead it out and open a passage; 定 is to settle it in place. Neither means 制 (control) or 克 (conquest). The chapter's remedies work by giving the surplus somewhere to go, which is why the correct agent is always drawn from the Day Master's own output rather than from its enemy.
失身 here means losing one's footing — forfeiting one's own standing — not the later, narrower sense of sexual disgrace, and 淫賤 describes a collapse of order rather than a sexual verdict. The paired images (a fighting man given troops; a woman given favour and severity together) are about authority misapplied, not about soldiers or women as such. The archaic gendered diction is the author's rhetorical frame; the doctrine underneath it is pure Five Elements mechanics.
| Classical term | Rendered here | What it actually does |
|---|---|---|
| 剛 (gāng) | firm | The over-full, unyielding side of a chart — Metal at its peak, a warrior with troops. A description of condition, not of virtue. |
| 柔 (róu) | yielding | The pliant, under-supported side — Wood in autumn. Like 剛, a diagnosis of state rather than of character. |
| 相濟 (xiāng jì) | mutual complementation | Not averaging the two sides out, but supplying the agent that can carry each side's surplus away. 濟 is a crossing, not a compromise. |
| 情 (qíng) | true disposition | What an element actually is in its month — as opposed to its name. The whole chapter turns on 得情 versus 不得情. |
| 引通 (yǐn tōng) | leading through | Opening a passage so a pent-up disposition can discharge. The technical effect of Ren Water on Geng Metal. |
| 助 (zhù) | reinforce | To add to a side already in surplus. Here it is the failure mode, not the cure: 反助其剛. |
The opening concession is a trap. Yes, firm and yielding are meant to complement each other — but the chapter immediately narrows the claim: the complement only works when it enters through the right channel. Ding Fire, Yi Wood, Ji Earth and Gui Water are all formally “yielding” relative to a Metal Day Master at its peak, and every one of them makes matters worse. Fire excites it, Wood gives it something to cut, Earth feeds it, Water only hones it.
So the operative question was never “is this element firm or yielding?” but “does it reach the disposition?” A remedy that arrives as confrontation (激) or as fear (畏) hardens the chart; a remedy that arrives as reinforcement (助) inflates it. Only two verbs in the whole chapter are curative — 引通 and 定 — and both describe flow, not pressure. This is the earliest clear statement in the 滴天髓 that the quality of an intervention matters more than its classification.
Look at which agents actually work. Geng, a Yang stem, is rescued by Ren Water — also Yang. Yi, a Yin stem, is rescued by Ding Fire — also Yin. Now look at the failures: against Geng the chapter lists Ding, Yi, Ji and Gui, all Yin; against Yi it lists Wu, Yin and Geng, all Yang. In both lists the agents that aggravate the imbalance stand on the far side of the polarity line from the Day Master they are supposed to help.
There is a second pattern stacked on the first. Ren is what Geng produces (庚生壬), and Ding is what Yi produces (乙生丁); both are the Day Master's own output star. The cure is therefore not the enemy that suppresses the excess but the Day Master's own voice given a channel — a same-polarity output that can speak the surplus out of the chart. Note the limit of the rule: Jia is Yang and still helps Yi, but it helps by 幫 (same-element support), a different mechanism from 濟. The polarity hinge governs mediation, not every friendly stem.
The analogies are not decoration; they are a matched pair. A fighting man given troops is force multiplied without direction — the chart does not become stronger in any useful sense, it becomes destructive (殺伐). A woman given favour and severity at once is discipline and indulgence applied to something too pliant to hold either — the chart does not become balanced, it loses its footing (失身).
Read together they say one thing: authority applied to position instead of to disposition ruins the subject in both directions. The firm is not cured by sweetening it, and the yielding is not cured by stiffening it. The chapter closes with 餘倣此 — work the rest out the same way — which is a demand, not a courtesy: the reader is expected to derive the remaining stem-and-month combinations himself rather than memorise two examples. That is the whole method of the 滴天髓 in miniature.
Source text: 《滴天髓》, attributed to 劉基 (Liu Ji, 1311–1375), edited by 陳之遴. Public domain, via Wikisource.
Translation and commentary © xmcsl.cn. Editorial, not lineage transmission.
Di Tian Sui滴天髓BaZi剛柔論