Four Pillars (Saju)

Read your natal chart and the balance of the Five Elements from your year, month, day and hour of birth.

Saju (Four Pillars) writes your birth year, month, day, and hour as eight characters of heavenly stems and earthly branches, then reads your innate temperament and the flow of fortune through the balance of the Five Elements. maiunse builds the chart on a verified lunisolar calendar and unfolds it step by step: element strength including hidden stems, strong/weak day master and the useful element, Ten Gods distribution, and the great, yearly, and monthly luck cycles. The art took its present form when Xu Ziping of the Song dynasty shifted the centre to the day stem, where Li Xuzhong of the Tang had read from the year pillar; this is what is called Ziping astrology. The lunisolar calendar it relies on is an almanac with the solar terms and the stems and branches worked out for every date, and because months are cut at the solar terms, two people born in the same May can fall either side of the Beginning of Summer and receive different month pillars. Times are calculated as standard time, and you can turn on a true-solar-time correction for the longitude of your birthplace if you want one. Gender is asked only to set the direction the luck pillars run in, and the eight characters themselves are the same either way.

How it works

Enter your birth date and hour, and the chart is built from the traditional almanac. Lunar birthdays and solar-term boundaries are handled, and if you don't know your birth hour we read the remaining three pillars.

What you'll get

You see, in the order they appear on screen, the chart structure and whether that structure comes off well or struggles against a strong or weak chart, the balance of the five elements around your Day Master, whether the chart runs strong or weak with its useful and helpful elements, the special stars and the Twelve Stages, and then the yearly and monthly luck leading into the great luck cycles, along with the spread of the Ten Gods. The day branch — your inner self and the spouse palace — is read here too, along with love, calling, money and health drawn from the day stem alone. The sixty-jiazi day-pillar reading, the unions and clashes inside the chart, and the six relations — the ten gods read as family — all follow on the same screen.

The order to read the eight characters in

Open a Saju chart for the first time and there are so many characters you cannot tell where to begin. There is a set order. First take the day stem alone as yourself, then look at how the remaining seven characters stand in relation to you, and last read the timing through the great luck and yearly cycles. The result page is laid out in that order, so simply read from the top down. Do not try to take it all in at once: holding on to the day stem and the day branch alone gets you halfway.

Strong or weak is not good or bad

Many people believe a strong chart is good and a weak one bad. That is not what the terms mean. They tell you whether your own energy runs ample or short, and each is simply used differently. A strong chart has drive but needs somewhere to spend it; a weak chart needs support but makes good use of what is around it. That said, opinions differ on what to take as the useful element, so rather than hunting for one answer, follow the reasoning behind each view.

A missing element is not a problem

When an element is absent from a chart altogether, it is easy to feel something has gone badly wrong. It has not. Having all five spread evenly across eight characters is in fact rare, and an empty place gets filled by the luck cycles and by how you live. The guidance on the result page tells you how to supply what is thin through colour, direction and habit; it is not pointing out a defect. Rather than worrying about what is missing, look at what will fill it.

The same chart is not the same life

Plenty of people are born on the same day at the same hour, and twins share a chart exactly. Their lives still turn out differently. What the tradition maps is the grain of your inborn conditions, not a list of events. Give the same chart a different upbringing and different choices and you get an entirely different life. A chart is closer to a map; which road you take is yours to decide.

What not to settle with a chart

Do not fix a moving date, a marriage, a change of name or a large investment on a chart alone. The tradition tells you the grain of a current, but it cannot weigh the numbers and circumstances a decision like that needs. Couples with low compatibility scores often last, and plenty of people do well in a season called difficult. Keep it as a reference and confirm with real conditions. If body or mind stays heavy for a long time, professional help comes before any reading.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I still read my chart without knowing my birth hour?

Yes. Without the hour we drop the hour pillar and read the year, month, and day pillars. The Day Master reading, the balance of the five elements, and the flow of great luck all still appear — only what depends on the hour is left out.

Can I enter a lunar birthday?

Yes. Choose lunar on the form and it is converted to the solar calendar with a traditional almanac, then the month pillar is set by the solar terms. Leap months are handled too.

Which clock does the birth hour follow?

By default the time you enter is used as standard time. Some practitioners correct to local solar time, so the form lets you switch on a true-solar-time correction, which shifts the time by the longitude of your birthplace (Seoul runs about 32 minutes ahead of its standard meridian). Pick a city or enter the offset in minutes; the equation of time is not applied. If you said you do not know the time, no correction is made.

How often does the luck pillar change?

Usually every ten years. The starting age depends on your birth month and the distance to the nearest solar term, so it differs from person to person — the luck pillar table in the result shows the age each stretch begins.

Why do you ask for gender?

Whether the luck pillars run forward or backward is set by the yin-yang of the birth year together with gender. So two people born on the same day at the same hour get different luck-pillar stems and branches, and different starting ages. Everything else — the eight characters, the elemental balance, the strong-or-weak judgement and the useful element — is identical either way.