How to Read Your Four Pillars (Saju) Chart
Your Saju — also called the Four Pillars of Destiny, or BaZi in Chinese — is a snapshot of the energy present at the exact moment you were born, written in the old language of ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches. A manse (만세력) is the traditional perpetual calendar used to convert any birth date and time into those four pillars. This free calculator does it for you in seconds.
The Four Pillars, one by one
Year Pillar — your roots: ancestry, early environment, and the broad generation you belong to.
Month Pillar — your formative years, your career engine, and your social self. It is the single most important pillar for judging the overall structure of a chart, because it carries the season you were born into.
Day Pillar — this is you. The upper character is your Day Master (your core self), and the lower character is your "spouse palace," which speaks to partnership.
Hour Pillar — your later years, your children, and your private inner world.
Your Day Master: the anchor of the whole chart
The Heavenly Stem sitting on top of your Day Pillar is your Day Master — the "you" that everything else in the chart is read against. There are ten of them: Yin and Yang versions of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. Knowing yours is the first real step into Saju, because it frames your personality, your strengths, and the relationships in your chart.
The Five Elements and their balance
Every stem and branch carries one of the five elements — Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water. The balance between them (and, just as importantly, what is missing or excessive) shapes temperament, health tendencies, and the flow of fortune. The colored cells in your result show this balance at a glance.
Why your exact birth time matters
The Hour Pillar changes roughly every two hours, so a guessed time can change a quarter of your chart. Even more subtly, the Month Pillar is set by the 24 solar terms — not by the calendar month — so a birthday near a solar-term boundary can shift the whole reading. Enter your time as precisely as you can, and use the timezone and longitude options for the most accurate result.
How to use this calculator
Enter your birth date and time above. The calculator instantly returns all four pillars with five-element colors, identifies your Day Master, and shows the matching lunar date and any solar term — no sign-up required.