How do you read a saju chart?
You read a saju chart in a fixed order. Find the day master first, then the season of birth, then read the five elements around those two. A saju (사주), the Korean reading of the four pillars of birth, is eight characters in four columns, and those eight are not equal in weight. One of them is you. One sets the weather the others live in. Find those two and the other six stop being noise.
That is also the order of this page.
- Lay out the four pillars and see which square is which.
- Find the day master, the stem of your birth day.
- Read the month branch for your season of birth.
- Count the five elements across all eight characters.
- Open the branches for the stems hidden inside.
- Name the ten gods, each character's relation to that day master.
- Stop, and be honest about what you cannot reach alone.
First you need a correct chart. Any free calculator turns a birth date and time into the eight characters, and that part is arithmetic, so let a computer do it. If the four pillars are new to you, what saju is is the shorter place to begin.
What does a four pillars chart look like on the page?
Four columns and two rows. Korean charts are usually laid out right to left, so the hour pillar sits at the left of your screen and the year pillar at the right. The top row holds the four heavenly stems (천간), the bottom row the four earthly branches (지지), the twelve animals of the Korean zodiac. Four and four make the eight characters, the palja (팔자).
| Pillar | Built from | Traditionally read as |
|---|---|---|
| Year | Year of birth | Ancestry, family origin, early childhood |
| Month | Month of birth | Parents, upbringing, working life, and the season, which makes it the heaviest square |
| Day | Day of birth | The stem is you. The branch below is read as spouse or partner |
| Hour | Hour of birth | Children, what you put out, later years |
That last column is a frame rather than a rule. Without a birth time, three of the four columns still stand, which is its own subject.
Which character is my day master?
Your day master (일간) is the top character of the day column, third from the right in a Korean layout, above the day branch. It is the one character that stands for you, and every other character is read in relation to it. The same water character supports one person and burdens another, depending on whose day master it sits beside. There are ten, five elements in a yang and a yin form each.
| Day master | Element | The image read with it |
|---|---|---|
| Gap (갑, 甲) | Yang wood | A standing tree, growing straight up |
| Eul (을, 乙) | Yin wood | A vine, bending around things |
| Byeong (병, 丙) | Yang fire | The sun, light on everything |
| Jeong (정, 丁) | Yin fire | A lamp in a dark room |
| Mu (무, 戊) | Yang earth | A mountain, an embankment |
| Gi (기, 己) | Yin earth | Garden soil, ground things grow in |
| Gyeong (경, 庚) | Yang metal | Ore or an axe, unfinished |
| Sin (신, 辛) | Yin metal | A cut jewel, worked and exact |
| Im (임, 壬) | Yang water | A river, a large body in motion |
| Gye (계, 癸) | Yin water | Rain and dew, soaking in |
The third column is not decoration. Those are mulsang, the image a character is read through, and thinking in images rather than adjectives is how I keep a chart whole. The image covers that work. Read your row as one character out of eight, not as a verdict on your personality.
How do I find my season of birth from the month branch?
Look at the branch in the month column, the bottom character of the second pillar from the right. That one character gives you the season you were born into. In, Myo and Jin (인묘진) are spring. Sa, O and Mi (사오미) are summer. Sin, Yu and Sul (신유술) are autumn. Hae, Ja and Chuk (해자축) are winter.
The season changes how every other character is read, and this is the step beginners skip. A Byeong yang fire day master born in the O month, the height of summer, is fire on fire, with light to spare and nowhere obvious to send it. The same Byeong born in the Ja month, deep winter, is one source of warmth in a cold chart, and everything near it either shelters that warmth or puts it out. Same day master, opposite situations.
One trap before you draw conclusions. Saju months and years do not follow the calendar. They turn on solar terms, and the year turns at ipchun (입춘), around the fourth of February, so someone born on the twentieth of January belongs to the previous saju year. If your chart looks a year or a month off, this is almost always why.
How do I count the five elements, and how far can I trust the count?
Give each of the eight characters an element and add them up. The stems are direct: Gap and Eul are wood, Byeong and Jeong fire, Mu and Gi earth, Gyeong and Sin metal, Im and Gye water. For the branches, In and Myo are wood, Sa and O fire, Sin and Yu metal, Hae and Ja water, and Jin, Sul, Chuk and Mi are all earth.
You get something like three wood, two earth, two water, one fire, no metal. That is a real fact about your chart and the least informative thing you will learn today. Three reasons to hold it loosely.
- Position carries weight. A character in the month branch, which sets the season, counts for more than the same one out on the year stem.
- The count only means something relative to your day master. Metal is pressure on a wood day master and support for a water one, so missing metal is not one condition but ten.
- Characters hide. What you counted is the surface, and the branches hold more inside them.
The count is a first impression to be tested. What a chart is actually short of is a separate judgement, worked through in the five elements and what a chart needs.
What are the hidden stems in the branches?
Every earthly branch holds one to three stems inside it. These are the jijanggan (지장간), the hidden stems, and they count as much as the characters printed on top. Most free displays leave them out, which is how a surface count misleads.
The In branch (인, 寅) holds Mu, Byeong and Gap, so it carries fire and earth as well as the wood it counts as. The Sa branch (사, 巳) holds Mu, Gyeong and Byeong, carrying metal while counting as fire. The last stem listed in each is the main one that gives the branch its element, and the others sit behind it with less force but real presence.
Here is how that goes wrong. Someone counts eight characters, finds no fire, and concludes their chart is cold with an element missing. Then they open the branches and find In in the month and Sa in the hour, each holding Byeong, yang fire, inside. That chart has fire. Not fire in the open, but fire that can be reached, and calling the chart fireless sends the reading the wrong way.
What are the ten gods?
The ten gods, sipsin (십신), are names for the relationship between your day master and every other character. Five relationships, each in a yin and a yang form, which is where ten comes from. A character of the same element as your day master is a peer. One your day master produces is output, what you make and express. One it controls is wealth. One that controls it is officer, the pressure you answer to. One that produces it is resource, what supports you. For a Gap yang wood day master, other wood is a peer, fire is output, earth is wealth, metal is officer, water is resource. They are directions of energy rather than job titles, and none of the ten is good news or bad news on its own.
Where does reading your own chart stop being reliable?
That is a real first pass. Here is where it runs out.
The branches act on each other. Two can form a hap (합), a combination that binds them and changes how they behave, or a chung (충), a clash that unsettles both. Read without those, a chart is eight separate characters rather than one arrangement. Judging whether the day master is well or thinly supported, and what the chart most needs, is a further step and the one that takes longest to learn. Then there is timing, which the eight characters alone will not give you. What moves a chart is the ten year cycles and the yearly cycle.
Two careful readers can also look at the same eight characters and emphasise different things, for honest reasons. Why saju readings differ sets out where the splits come from.
What this page cannot do for your chart
This is general explanation. It gets you a genuine first pass, and it is not a reading. A reading means holding all eight characters together with the season, the hidden stems, the branch interactions and the decade you are in now, then saying what that tends towards and when the pressure shifts. That is a judgement about tendency and timing, never a fixed outcome.
What I do is set each chart down as one landscape, then write it out at about fifty pages. Slow, and the only way I know to keep a whole chart in view at once. The sample pages show how that reads. Reports are written in Korean at present, and an English edition is in preparation with a waitlist.
The calendar conversion, the stems and branches, the solar term boundaries: arithmetic, and I let a computer do it. Deciding what it all means is the slow part.