Eight characters, not a star sign
Write down the moment you were born. The year, the month, the day, the hour. In the old East Asian calendar each of those four is named with two characters, one from a set of ten and one from a set of twelve.
Four units of two characters each. Eight characters in total. That is your saju.
The Korean name for the whole thing is saju palja, which means four pillars, eight characters. People shorten it to saju in conversation.
| Pillar | What it is taken to describe |
|---|---|
| Year | The ground you started from. Family, the era, the long background |
| Month | The season you arrived in. This one carries the most weight of the four |
| Day | You. The upper character of this pillar is your day master |
| Hour | Later life, what you make, the people who come after |
There is no equivalent of a sun sign here. Nobody is simply a Leo. Two people born in the same month have different charts if the day or the hour differs, which is why a reading needs the date and the time and not just the month.
Your day master is the character to find first
Of the eight, one stands for you: the upper character of the day pillar. Korean readers call it the ilgan. In English it is usually the day master.
There are ten of them, five elements in a yang and a yin form each.
Yang and yin here are not good and bad, and not male and female. They are two ways of doing the same thing. Gap and Eul are both wood. Gap pushes straight up through whatever is in the way. Eul climbs by winding around something. Same destination, opposite method. Reading them as one thing throws away a character you were given.
The ten pages linked above go through each one properly. They are the most useful thing on this site if you are starting out.
What the other seven characters do
A day master on its own tells you very little. It is a single letter out of eight.
The other seven decide almost everything about how it reads. The month pillar matters most, because it sets the season, and a season changes what a character even is. Wood born in spring is a growing tree, and what it needs is feeding. The same wood born in autumn is seasoned timber, and what it needs is using. One character, two completely different readings, decided by the month.
Then there is what sits beside what. Metal next to wood is a blade near a tree, which can mean pruning or can mean damage, depending on the season and on how much of each there is. Nothing in a chart is read alone.
It is the first letter of a word. Useful, but not the word.
The five elements, and what "missing" means
Wood, fire, earth, metal, water. Each of the eight characters carries one of them, and the mix is the first thing any reader looks at.
Almost nobody has all five evenly. Eight characters do not divide neatly into five, so a chart with everything present and balanced is the rare case, not the normal one.
A missing element is not a defect. It usually means one of two things. Either you learn that whole area from other people, because you do not carry it yourself, or the force that would have gone into it is pooled somewhere else and you go further in that direction than most. Crowding causes more trouble than absence does. Four or five characters of the same element will flatten the rest of the chart, and that is the situation worth watching.
Time: the ten year cycles
The eight characters do not move. What moves over them is the weather.
Every ten years or so the background shifts. Korean readers call these the dae-un, the ten year cycles. On top of that each calendar year brings its own pair of characters, and each month within it another.
So a reading has two halves. What you are, which does not change, and what season you are standing in, which does. Most of what people actually want to know lives in the second half. Not what am I, but is this a year to start something or a year to hold.
This is the part I write at greatest length. Ten year blocks out to age one hundred, then the coming decade year by year, then the coming twelve months one at a time.
Saju, bazi and Western astrology
People ask how these relate, so here it is plainly.
Saju and bazi are the same system. Same eight characters, same calendar, same elements. What differs is the reading tradition. Korean practice leans on the day master and its relationship to the season more than most Chinese schools do, and Korean readers tend to give the ten year cycles more room. I also work in the mulsang tradition, which reads each character as a physical thing in a scene rather than as an abstract force. That is where the paintings come from.
Western astrology is a different system entirely. It reads planetary positions against the ecliptic. Saju reads a calendar of characters. They are not translations of each other, and a chart from one cannot be converted into the other.
What it can and cannot tell you
It can describe how you are built. How you approach work, what tires you, what you reach for under pressure, which conditions bring the best out of you.
It can describe timing. Which stretches push in your direction and which push against, and roughly how long each lasts.
It cannot tell you what will happen. It cannot name an illness, an accident, a person, or a date. Anyone who does that is going past what the eight characters contain. When people ask me about life and death, or whether an operation will go well, I say plainly that saju is not the place to ask, and I mean it.
Read it as a weather forecast for a long season, not as a schedule of events.
If you want to see one
A full sample report is on the site, all forty nine pages of it, so you can see exactly what this looks like before you decide whether it is for you.
Where have I seen saju before?
Quite possibly on screen. The Disney+ competition Battle of Fates (운명전쟁49) put saju readers alongside shamans and tarot readers, and K-dramas use saju for wedding checks, lucky dates and name changes. Visitors to Korea often meet it first at a saju cafe in Seoul.