What is saju?

The short answer

Saju 사주 is Korean for four pillars. The full name is saju palja 사주팔자, four pillars and eight characters, which is exactly what the chart is: the year, month, day and hour of a birth, each written as two characters.

If that sounds like BaZi, it is. Saju and BaZi read the same chart. The calendar, the stems and branches and the arithmetic are shared. Saju is the Korean tradition doing the reading.

What is actually different

Three things, and none of them changes the chart.

The vocabulary. The characters are read in Korean rather than Chinese. Your day master is your ilgan 일간. The ten relationships between your day master and the other characters are the sipseong. Your decade cycles are daeun 대운. A Korean reading also tends to name the sinsal, the symbolic markers, more readily than a Chinese one.

The register. Saju in Korea is ordinary. It is checked before a marriage, a move or a business decision, often by people who would not describe themselves as believers. That practical framing shapes how a reading is written: less cosmology, more what this means for the thing you are deciding.

Some conventions. A few technical choices differ between traditions, including how the luck cycle direction is set and how certain boundary cases are handled. These are documented choices rather than disagreements about the chart.

What a saju reading covers

Most of a reading is four things. What your ilgan is and what it is made of. What the five elements count to across your chart, and what running short of one actually looks like day to day. The sipseong, which are better understood as recurring roles than as fortunes. And your daeun, the decade cycles, which say which stretches favour expansion and which favour consolidation.

The honest limits

Saju works from a birth moment, so it is only as good as the moment you supply. An unknown birth time removes the hour pillar and narrows what the reading can say, which an honest reading states rather than guesses past.

It also does not predict events. It describes tendencies and timing. Anyone offering a dated outcome from four pillars is doing something the texts do not support.

Common questions

Notes

Is saju the same as BaZi?

The chart is the same. Both compute four pillars from the same birth moment by the same calendar rules, so the eight characters do not differ. What differs is the tradition reading them: the vocabulary is Korean, the ten gods are the sipseong, the day master is the ilgan, and some conventions around luck cycles are handled differently.

Is saju fortune telling?

In Korea it sits closer to a consultation than a prediction. A saju reading describes tendencies and timing, which is why it is commonly checked before a decision like a move or a marriage rather than to find out what will happen. A reading that names a fixed future is not doing what the classical texts describe.

Do I need to read Korean to get a saju reading?

Not for a reading written in English. Every hangul and hanja that appears should carry its meaning where it sits, so nothing is left as a term you are expected to already know.