The Ten Gods of Saju (Sipsin): A Plain-English Guide
Maker's note: 기준일 2026-10-09. Written by the AZET team (AZET 운영팀) as operators, not as customers. Seowoon's Korean site seowoongwan.com is operated by 에이치컴퍼니(사업자등록번호 316-47-00948, 통신판매업 신고 2023-부산강서구-1073); menu names below reflect that site as of October 9, 2026. Saju content is for fun and reference. It does not predict outcomes and is not advice.
Open any detailed saju reading and you will hit a wall of unfamiliar labels: 정재, 편관, 식신, 정인. These are the sipsin (십신), usually translated as the "ten gods," and they are the working vocabulary of the whole system. The English name is misleading. There are no deities involved. The ten gods are ten relationship labels, and once you see how they are generated, most of a reading becomes legible.
Start with the day stem
A saju chart has four pillars, and the upper character of the day pillar, the day stem, is conventionally taken to stand for the person. Readers call it the day master. Every other character in the chart is then described by its relationship to that one stem.
Two properties define the relationship:
- Element. Using the five elements, is the other character the same element as the day master, the one it generates, the one it controls, the one that controls it, or the one that generates it?
- Polarity. Is the other character the same yin or yang polarity as the day master, or the opposite?
Five element relationships times two polarities gives ten labels. That is the entire derivation.
The ten, in five families
| Family | Relationship to day master | Same polarity | Opposite polarity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peers (비겁) | Same element | 비견 | 겁재 |
| Output (식상) | Element the day master generates | 식신 | 상관 |
| Wealth (재성) | Element the day master controls | 편재 | 정재 |
| Authority (관성) | Element that controls the day master | 편관 | 정관 |
| Resource (인성) | Element that generates the day master | 편인 | 정인 |
A worked example: suppose the day master is 갑, which is yang wood. Wood generates fire, so fire characters are its output family. 병 is yang fire, same polarity, so it is 식신. 정 is yin fire, opposite polarity, so it is 상관. Wood controls earth, so earth is the wealth family. Metal controls wood, so metal is authority. Water generates wood, so water is resource.
What the families are taken to describe
These are the traditional associations, stated as shorthand:
- Peers: self-reliance, colleagues, siblings, competition.
- Output: expression, making things, skills, speech.
- Wealth: resources one manages, practical results, the material side of life.
- Authority: rules, responsibility, structure, roles one answers to.
- Resource: learning, support, credentials, being looked after.
Within each family, the two members are read with different flavours. 정재, for instance, is often described as steady and earned, 편재 as mobile and opportunistic. 정관 is read as orderly structure, 편관 as pressure and challenge. Do not be put off by the prefixes: 정 means "proper" and 편 means "slanted," which older texts sometimes used with moral overtones. Modern readers mostly treat them as two styles and not as good and bad.
Why position matters
A label alone says little. Readers also consider where it sits. The month pillar is commonly associated with the working years and social setting, the year pillar with early life and family background, the hour pillar with later life. A resource character in the month pillar gets described differently from the same character in the hour pillar. This is one reason two people who both "have 정관" can receive quite different readings.
Counts matter too. A chart may have three characters from one family and none from another. Readers describe that as an emphasis, a tendency in how someone approaches things, and not as a verdict.
Reading the labels without overreading them
The ten gods are a classification scheme. They sort the eight characters into roles so that a reader has something to say about work, money, study, and relationships. That makes them useful as a structured set of prompts, and it also makes them easy to overread.
A few guardrails we would suggest:
- A strong wealth family is not a statement about your bank balance. It is a symbolic emphasis within a symbolic system.
- A missing family does not mean that part of life is closed to you. With only eight slots, most charts leave something out.
- Old gendered interpretations, such as reading the authority family as "husband" in a woman's chart, come from another era. Many contemporary readers have moved on from them, and you are free to as well.
Held loosely, the labels can still be thought-provoking. "Heavy on output, light on resource" is a neat way to ask yourself whether you produce more than you take in.
Where to see your ten gods
Seowoon (서운관) is the Korean saju service in the AZET family. On seowoongwan.com, the general traditional reading 도사님 정통사주 is the place to see a chart laid out with its relationship labels. Because the authority and output families are the ones readers lean on when talking about work, people interested in that angle sometimes follow up with 커리어사주. The pages are in Korean; this post should let you recognise the ten terms even when automatic translation mangles them.
FAQ
What are the ten gods in saju? Ten labels describing how each character in a chart relates to the day stem, based on five-element relationship and yin or yang polarity.
Are the ten gods actual gods? No. The name is a literal translation of 십신. They are categories, not beings.
What is the day master? The heavenly stem of the day pillar. Readers take it to represent the person and describe everything else relative to it.
Is 편관 or 상관 a bad sign? Older texts treated some labels harshly. Most modern readers describe them as styles with strengths and costs. No label fixes anyone's future.
Where can I see these in my own chart? Seowoon's 도사님 정통사주 at seowoongwan.com shows them, in Korean, for fun and reference.
Learn more
Seowoon is listed with the rest of the AZET family at https://azet.io, where the early-access waitlist for our AI assistant, azet, is also open. Signing up is free and commits you to nothing. Learn the ten labels if you enjoy the puzzle of it, and leave the big decisions where they belong, with you.