Counts · three ways to answer one question
The question sounds like it has one answer. It has three, and all three are defensible — they differ in how much weight the hidden stems inside each branch are given. This page shows the same chart under each convention, then says what the answer is and is not good for.
The example chart is 1985-07-04 12:00 (乙丑 Yi Chou · 壬午 Ren Wu · 甲辰 Jia Chen · 庚午 Geng Wu). Every number below is computed:
| Convention | 木 Wood | 火 Fire | 土 Earth | 金 Metal | 水 Water |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visible stems and branches only (the eight characters) | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| With hidden stems at half weight (0.5 each) | 2.5 | 3 | 4 | 1.5 | 2 |
| With hidden stems at full weight (1.0 each) | 3 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 3 |
The bolded cell is the lowest count under that convention. Note that the set of least-present elements is not the same across the three rows — which is exactly why the question has to be asked before it is answered.
A second reading of missing is rare. Unfold all sixty day pillars and count how often each element appears as the day stem, and as the main qi of the day branch:
| Position | 木 Wood | 火 Fire | 土 Earth | 金 Metal | 水 Water |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Day stem (10 stems × 6) | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 |
| Day branch main qi (12 branches × 5) | 10 | 10 | 20 | 10 | 10 |
As a day stem the five elements are exactly even, twelve each, because the ten stems pair into the five elements. As the day branch main qi, Earth appears 20 times against 10 for each other element: the four Earth branches are a third of the twelve. So "I am missing Earth" is the hardest claim to make at this level.
The popular version jumps from "what is missing" straight to "which coloured stone to wear and which way to sleep". There is no reproducible step in that jump: turning a count into a prescription requires inserting something the classical conventions never contained. This site publishes the first half — the counts, the conventions, the differences — and declines the second. Asking which element is useful for a chart is a different question with published rules of its own (the balance and climate schools, on the favourable-element page); it is not the same question as what is missing.
Enter a birth date to see all three conventions at once, with the lowest element under each. Leave the hour empty if unknown.
A note on what this page deliberately does not do: the popular versions of this material assign a fixed personality to each term — one character per branch, one destiny per stage. This site rejects that framing. What is published here is a structural position: which element sits where, on what kind of ground, with which tenants inside. The same term reads differently under a different month command, and no meaningful judgement exists without the other characters of the chart. Where the tradition offers a reading it is labelled as the tradition's; this site's own contribution is that every number and term on this page is computed, versioned and checkable against the methodology page.
These are the questions specific to this page; broader conventions live on the methodology page.
Every enumerable component of ba zi has its own page here. Each page is computed by the same engine and can be checked item by item — none of it is a personality table.