How the calculator works
The four pillars, called BaZi in Chinese and saju in Korean, read the moment you were born as four pairs of characters: one each for the year, the month, the day and the hour. The top character of each pair is a heavenly stem, which carries an element and a yin or yang. The bottom one is an earthly branch, one of the twelve zodiac animals. Eight characters in all, which is what bazi means.
Enter your birth date, and your time and place if you know them. The calculator shows each pillar in hanja, by its Korean reading and in English, year first: the Yang Fire Horse, for example, is byeong-o in Korean. Then it shows your day element and how your eight characters spread across the five elements.
Your day element, the day master
Saju reads you by one character above the rest: the stem of your day pillar. BaZi books call it the day master, and this calculator calls it your day element. It is one of ten: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal or Water, each in a yang and a yin form. Every other character in the chart is read by how it meets that one.
It is not the element a Chinese zodiac calculator gives you, which comes from your birth year. For most people the two differ.
Beside it the calculator says how much of the rest of the chart supports it: strong, balanced or weak. That is a leaning about where your energy comes from, not a verdict on you.
Your five elements
Each of the eight characters carries one of the five elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. The counts show which run strong in your chart and which are scarce. A chart with none of an element is common and is not a flaw; saju reads it as an energy you may reach for rather than lead with.
The counts are of the eight characters you can see. The full reading in the app also weighs the stems hidden inside each branch.
Why the time and the place matter
- The year and the month turn at the solar terms, to the minute. The year begins at the start of spring, near 4 February, not on 1 January, and each month begins near the 4th to the 8th of a calendar month. A birth close to one of those turns can fall on either side, and the calculator reads it by the minute.
- The hour pillar needs a birth time. Without one you get three pillars, and the hour stays blank.
- The place sets the timezone and the sun time. Saju reads the hour by the sun where you were born, so a birthplace corrects the clock by how far the place sits from its timezone’s meridian. In Seoul that is about half an hour. Without a place the chart is read on clock time, and says so.
- A birth between 11 pm and midnight is in the Rat hour. Some schools also move it to the next day’s pillar; this calculator keeps the day until midnight.
Each of these is covered in full in the Library’s article on the four pillars.
Questions
Is this a BaZi calculator or a saju calculator?
Both. BaZi is the Chinese name and saju the Korean one for the same chart, and the characters are the same. The calculator gives each one its Korean reading, romanized, and its English name.
Do I need my birth time?
No. Your year, month and day pillars need only the date. The time adds the hour pillar, and with it two of your eight characters.
What is true solar time?
Clock time corrected for where you were born. Pick a birthplace and the calculator applies it to your day and hour pillars. Without one it reads the clock.
Where is my Chinese zodiac animal?
In the first column. The branch of your year pillar is your zodiac animal, and its stem gives the element a zodiac calculator means.
Is my birth date saved?
No. It is sent once to work out your chart and is not stored, here or in an account. The full reading, with your glyph, is free in the InnateGlyph app.