八字 · Four Pillars of Destiny
Bazi Chart
Chinese destiny analysis reads a birth moment as four pairs of characters. The day stem — your day master — is you; everything else is the terrain you were given.
In short
Cast your Bazi four pillars of destiny: year, month, day and hour stems and branches, your day master, and the balance of the five elements.
- A strong day master needs outlets; a weak one needs resources. Almost all Bazi advice reduces to that sentence.
- The hour pillar is the most sensitive to error — a wrong hour rewrites a quarter of the chart.
- Seasonal strength matters enormously: wood in spring is not the same wood as wood in autumn.
- Favourable elements are worked into life through colour, direction, career field and timing rather than charms.
Bazi — 'eight characters' — reads the year, month, day and hour of birth as four pillars, each with a heavenly stem and an earthly branch. The system reached its mature form in the Song dynasty under Xu Ziping, who made the day stem the self and read everything else in relation to it.
Where Western astrology reads planets, Bazi reads the balance of five elements across those eight characters, and the ten gods — relational roles produced by how each element treats the day master.
Questions Readers Ask
Why does the month pillar not match my birth month?
Bazi months begin at solar terms, roughly the 4th to 8th of each Gregorian month, not on the 1st.
What are the ten gods?
Ten relational roles — resource, output, wealth, power and companion, each in yin and yang form — describing how every element in the chart treats the day master.
How long is a luck pillar?
Ten years. The start age depends on the birth month and the direction of the sequence.