What is saju?

Four pillars, eight characters

Your birth has four pillars: year, month, day and hour. Each pillar is one heavenly stem (10 in all) on top of one earthly branch (12 in all).

Stems and branches pair up in a fixed cycle of 60, so four pillars give you eight characters. That is why it’s called bazi (八字), or “eight characters,” in Chinese; Korean also says palja (팔자).

Where the characters come from

Saju does not read planets. It reads the calendar. The year and month pillars change at the solar terms, the 24 points of the sun’s yearly path, and the year changes at Ipchun (立春) around February 4.

The day pillar is a 60-day count that keeps running without gaps. The hour pillar comes from twelve two-hour blocks, so a birth time and place matter.

What a reading looks at

The stem of your day pillar is your day master, the core element that represents you. A reading then looks at the balance of the five elements, the ten gods (how each character relates to you), combinations and clashes between branches, and luck cycles: 10-year pillars (daeun) and yearly pillars (seun).

What you need

Your birth date, the time if you know it, and the city. The city sets the time zone, and many Korean readers also correct for longitude: in Seoul, local solar time runs about 32 minutes behind Korea Standard Time.

Without a birth time you still get six of the eight characters. Lunar birthdays can be converted to the solar calendar first.

What saju is not

Saju is a traditional way of describing people and time. There is no scientific evidence that it predicts events. Use it for fun and self-reflection, not for medical, legal or money decisions.