A tour of the eight structures — eight boards of a life
The user manual for your structure
📖 The four auspicious structures
Direct Officer — the board of organisation, administration and honour. Principle and reputation are the assets, and the classics warn to beware Hurting Officer luck, which breaks the Officer. Wealth (Direct or Indirect) — the board of management, finance and distribution. It is a vessel that handles money, so the Day Master must be sturdy (strong) to carry a large sum. Direct Resource — the board of scholarship, education and documents. A structure where learning becomes your living; too much Resource stacks theory only, so Output is the helper. Eating God — the board of specialist talent and of food, clothing and shelter. A one-well craftsman structure, and the traditional advice is to guard against Indirect Resource luck, which controls the Eating God (called “upsetting the rice bowl”).
📖 The four rough structures — raw ore that rises when cut
Seven Killings — the board of power and crisis management. Suppress the Killings with an Eating God, or digest them through Resource, and it becomes the vessel of a general. Hurting Officer — the board of expression and innovation. Let the Hurting Officer meet Wealth and it transforms into the finest structure there is, talent turning into money. Indirect Resource — the board of specialist and research work. Unorthodox depth is the weapon and balance with the Eating God is the crux. Blade (in the Rival line) — the board of contest and craft. A blade can be a weapon or a surgical instrument, so meeting the Seven Killings (control) it becomes the structure of a great physician or a great master. All eight share one grammar: read a chart’s success or failure by whether there is a helper that keeps the structure alive and a spoiler that breaks it.
🔍 In practice
Summarise your structure’s user manual in three lines. ① The name and character of my board ② the Ten God that keeps it alive (the helper) ③ the Ten God that breaks it (the warning). For an Eating God structure: “the board of specialist talent / Wealth is the helper (turning talent into money) / guard the rice bowl in Indirect Resource years.” With those three lines you can interpret any year’s luck for yourself.
🧭 Working through the situations
Widen the mapping of structure to profession to a practical range. Eating God — not just chef and teacher but developer (code as output), video creator, product planner: every board that makes something to live on. Direct Officer — not just the civil service but corporate management, compliance, school and hospital administration: boards where norms are the asset. Indirect Wealth — not just entrepreneurs but fund managers, trade, platform operations: boards that ride the flow of money. Hurting Officer — not just artists but marketers, critics, reform-minded politics and journalism: boards that overturn the old. When the era changes the job titles change and the nature of the board doesn’t. The real use of studying structure is becoming able to classify for yourself which board a newly invented job belongs to.
❓ Frequently asked
Q. What are the conditions for a completed structure? The conditions under which a structure counts as complete, each having its favoured combination. Three tastes: an Eating God structure meeting Wealth (talent turning into money) is a high structure; a Seven Killings structure meeting an Eating God’s suppression or Resource’s digestion is a high structure; a Hurting Officer structure flowing into Wealth is a high structure. One pattern — combinations that refine rough energy and let good energy flow are what keep a structure alive. Q. My structure looks like two. Keep the basic structure taken from the month Branch’s principal at the centre, and where another surfaced energy is strong it can be read as a dual structure. It often reads as a career moving between two boards (a main job plus a side one). Q. If my structure is low, is my life low? High and low describe the completeness of the structure, not the grade of a life. The classics are full of people who succeeded enormously from a low structure — the story of luck and effort beating structure, which is why Myeongri isn’t determinism.
✏️ Today’s one step
Finish the three-line manual. Then fix your family’s structures too and draw a map of which boards the people in your household are playing on — half of family conflict comes from a difference of board.