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What these systems are, in plain language, including the parts that are usually skipped. Written to be useful whether or not you ever order anything.

01 What is a day master? Of the eight characters in a BaZi or Saju chart, one is you. The rest describe what that one is standing in. Read → 02 What is saju? Saju 사주 means four pillars. It is the Korean practice of reading the eight characters of a birth moment, and in Korea it is checked before decisions rather than consulted for entertainment. Read → 03 Saju and BaZi, where they differ The most common question about these two systems has a short answer that surprises people: the chart is the same. Choosing between them is choosing a tradition to read in, not a more accurate calculation. Read → 04 Zi Wei Dou Shu and BaZi, which answers what These are not competing methods with the same output. They organise a life along different axes, which is why practitioners who use both do not treat one as a check on the other. Read → 05 BaZi and Western astrology, where they differ They share a premise, that the moment you were born is worth recording, and almost nothing else. The differences are structural rather than a matter of style. Read →

Where to start

If you have never met any of this, start with the day master. It is one character, it comes from your birth date alone, and almost everything else in a chart is described in relation to it. From there, the saju article covers the Korean framing of the same four pillars, and the two comparison pieces answer the question most people actually arrive with: which of these systems is going to tell me the thing I want to know.

None of it assumes you read Chinese or Korean. Every character on this site carries its English beside it, here and in the documents.

What these are, and are not

These are explanations of how the systems work, written to stand on their own. They are not summaries of a reading and they are not withheld halves of one: nothing here is a teaser for a fuller version behind a payment.

What they cannot do is tell you about your own chart, because they do not have it. An article can say what a day master is and what the twelve palaces are for. It cannot say which one you have, what season it landed in, or what that means for the decision you are weighing this year. That gap is the whole difference between reading about a system and having a chart read.

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These articles explain the systems. A reading applies one of them to your own birth minute and writes it out.

Korean Saju Reading 사주팔자 Your ilgan 일간, the element balance holding it up, your daeun 대운 cycles, and the sinsal worth knowing about. Every hanja translated where it sits. Read the page → BaZi Reading 八字 The four pillars read in full, with the ten gods translated into everyday roles and the luck pillars drawn as a timeline. Read the page → Zi Wei Dou Shu Reading 紫微斗數 Twelve palaces, one per area of a life, walked one at a time and read for the stars actually sitting in them. Every star named in English beside its character. Read the page →