Is your chart strong or weak?

The classical frame is three questions, asked of the Day Master in order of weight. 得令 — do you have the season? The month branch carries the season the chart was born into, and it is the single most important character on the board: a Day Master in its own season starts supported before anything else is counted. 得地 — do you have roots? A stem with its own element hidden in the branches stands on ground; one without stands on air. 得势 — do you have backing? Peers and support elsewhere in the chart, feeding or reinforcing you.

Element-counting — four fire, one metal, therefore weak — answers none of these, because it ignores the one thing all three questions turn on: where each character stands.

Every character in the chart weighs in, for the Day Master or against it — supporting characters count toward strength, draining and controlling ones against. Then position sets the weight: the month branch counts four times as much as any other single position, because it carries the season. The stems hidden inside each branch weigh in fractionally — the main one most, the minor ones less — and supporting characters that give the Day Master a root count extra. The total becomes a share, and the share falls into one of seven graded bands, from 极弱 (extremely weak) through 中和 (balanced) to 极强 (extremely strong) — not a coin flip between two labels.

Here is the real working for the chart the other pages use:

year  stem 庚 (metal)   +10     supports
month stem 壬 (water)   −10     drains
hour  stem 乙 (wood)    −10     drains

month branch 午 → 丁 (fire)  −28    the season itself
                   己 (earth) +15.6  supports, with root bonus
year  branch 午 → 丁 (fire)   −7    same character, ¼ the weight
                   己 (earth)  +3.9  supports, with root bonus
day   branch 亥 → 壬,甲      −10    drains
hour  branch 未 → 己,丁,乙   +1.5   mixed

share of support:  34 of 100  →  弱 (weak)

Read the two 丁 lines twice — they are the whole argument against element-counting. A tally sees two identical fire characters. The method sees one of them holding the most important seat on the board.

The verdict describes a condition, the way “left-handed” does. A strong Day Master can carry demands — it can afford to be drained, worked, spent. A weak one runs on support — it does better being fed than being loaded. Which situation is fortunate depends entirely on what the rest of the chart asks: a strong chart with nothing to spend itself on is stuck, and a weak chart that is well supported runs beautifully.

The engine’s own rulebook carries this as a standing boundary — 旺 does not mean usable, 弱 does not mean useless. Strength is a diagnostic read against what the structure needs, never a grade — which is why the product words readings around what helps your chart, and never around congratulating or consoling you for a verdict.

Honesty at the edges, since verdicts are bands: a chart near the middle is said to be near the middle rather than pushed to a side — and at the far extreme, a Day Master with no roots and almost no support may be read as following the dominant force rather than fighting it, a special structure the tradition treats with deliberate suspicion. When the evidence is not clean, the rule is 疑从不从 — when in doubt, it does not follow — and the doubt is recorded rather than smoothed.

Strength is where verdicts flip most often, and the reason is usually weights, not arithmetic errors: the schools genuinely differ on how hard the season dominates, how to count hidden stems, and where the band edges sit. Near a boundary, those choices flip the label. So treat a bare verdict the way you would treat a bare number — ask for the working. A source that shows which characters counted, and by how much, can be argued with; one that hands you “weak” and moves on cannot. Why two readings of the same chart disagree covers the pattern.

Strength exists to serve the next judgement — which elements genuinely help your chart. That is the reading’s centre of gravity, and where the ten relation-names start doing real work: the Ten Gods. Or see your own verdict with its working shown, in your own chart.