BaZi, read from the chart outward
Four pillars, ten gods, hidden stems and luck cycles — in the order you actually meet them. Start from a question, generate a chart, then read what each field is doing. Nothing here asks you to believe a verdict.
Start with what you are actually asking
Most BaZi pages begin with the system. This one begins with the question, because the same chart gets read differently depending on what you are trying to see.
Work and direction
Why does one kind of work drain me and another not?
The month pillar and the ten gods around the day master describe what the chart is set up to do: output, authority, wealth, support.
A chart with heavy output (eating god, hurting officer) and little authority reads differently from the reverse — one is described as making, the other as administering. Neither is better; they are different jobs.
The chart describes a disposition, not a career. It cannot tell you which company to join.
Generate a chart and follow alongMoney
Is there such a thing as a wealth structure in my chart?
Wealth in BaZi is a relation, not an amount: the element the day master controls. Whether that element is abundant, exposed, or buried under a branch changes the reading.
Wealth that is present but uncontrolled is read as opportunity without a container. The usual advice is not 'wait for luck' but 'build the container' — which is a statement about habits, not fate.
A chart cannot predict income. Treat any page that gives you a number with suspicion.
Generate a chart and follow alongRelationships
What does the day branch say about how I relate to people?
The day pillar pairs the self (stem) with the closest environment (branch). Its hidden stems and ten god describe what sits right next to you.
A day branch whose hidden stem is an officer element is read as structure close to the self — often experienced as obligation, sometimes as reliability. The same configuration is read both ways by different schools.
This is the most over-claimed area in the whole system. Read it as vocabulary, not as a diagnosis.
Generate a chart and follow alongTiming
Why do some years feel like a different chapter?
Luck pillars move the chart through ten-year cycles; annual pillars add a layer on top. Timing statements are always relative to the natal chart.
A year whose stem repeats the day master is described as a year of self — consolidation in some charts, stubbornness in others. The chart decides which; the year alone does not.
No luck pillar can be read without the natal chart. A page that reads one in isolation is guessing.
Generate a chart and follow alongNone of these cards promise an outcome. They point to the part of the chart a reader would look at, and to the limit of what that part can say.
Generate your four pillars
Uses solar terms rather than calendar months, so the month and hour pillars depend on the exact time and place. Every rule the calculation used is printed under the result.
The chart is produced by traditional rules, not by evidence that they describe a person. It makes no prediction and is not a substitute for medical, legal or financial advice.
Your birth details are not stored. If you only want to understand the fields first, the next section walks through a sample chart with the same structure.
What each field on the chart is doing
The chart above is a real calculation for a fixed example birth — not your chart. Click any position to highlight its explanation.
Sample chart: 25 March 1992, 08:10, Beijing (true solar time applied). Shown so the fields can be explained without exposing anyone's birth details.
Click a pillar, the day master, the element counts or the luck cycle to jump to its explanation.
Day master
The day stem; the reference point the whole chart is read against.
Every other stem in the chart is described by its relation to this one. That is what the ten gods are: ten fixed relations, not ten personality types. A day master is a position in a structure — calling it 'who you are' is already an interpretation, and a strong one.
Read more →Year pillar
The generation a chart belongs to; the outer frame.
The year changes at 立春 (start of spring), not on 1 January. Someone born in late January is still in the previous year's pillar, which is the single most common reason two sites disagree about a January birthday.
Read more →Month pillar
The season the chart is born into; the strongest single influence in most readings.
The month changes at one of twelve solar terms, not at the start of a calendar month. This is why the exact birth time matters: a birth a few hours before or after a term boundary can land in a different month pillar.
Read more →Day pillar
The self and its immediate environment.
The stem is the day master; the branch is what sits closest to it. The branch's hidden stems are what make two charts with identical visible characters read differently.
Read more →Hour pillar
The latest stage of life and the most private layer.
The hour is the pillar most often missing, because most people do not know their birth time. Substituting noon is a convention, not a result: the hour pillar becomes a placeholder and should be labelled as one.
Read more →Five element counts
What is present and what is absent — a balance, not a score.
Different schools weight stems, branches and hidden stems differently, so the numbers are only comparable within one counting method. This page prints its method for exactly that reason. A missing element is not automatically a problem; it is a question about what supports what.
Read more →Ten gods
Ten relations between the day master and every other stem.
Companion, rob wealth, eating god, hurting officer, indirect and direct wealth, seven killings, direct officer, indirect and direct resource. None of these are deities, and none of them are fixed character traits — they are derived, mechanically, from element and polarity.
Read more →Luck pillars
Ten-year cycles that carry the chart through time.
They start from the month pillar and run forward or backward by gender and year-stem polarity. The starting age is the distance to the neighbouring solar term, converted at three days to one year — which is why two calculators can disagree by a few months.
Read more →The six terms that carry the whole system
If you only learn six words, learn these — everything else is a combination of them.
Four pillars (四柱)Year, month, day and hour, each a stem above a branch.
Eight characters in total. The pillars are not independent: the month sets the season, the day sets the reference point, and the year and hour qualify them. Reading one pillar in isolation is the beginner's error the tradition itself warns about.
Four pillars (四柱) →Day master (日主)The day stem; the zero point of every relation.
The day master carries no ten god of its own, because the ten gods are defined relative to it. Everything the chart says is a statement about how other elements stand to this one character.
Day master (日主) →Ten gods (十神)Ten named relations produced by the five-element cycle and polarity.
Five elements, each in two polarities, gives ten relations. The system is generative rather than memorised: you can derive every ten god from the day master and the other stem in two steps, which is why the same character means different things in different charts.
Ten gods (十神) →Hidden stems (藏干)The one to three stems stored inside each branch.
Branches are not single elements; they are containers. A branch's primary hidden stem gives the branch-level ten god, and the secondary ones explain why two charts that look identical on the surface behave differently.
Hidden stems (藏干) →Luck pillars (大运)Ten-year cycles derived from the month pillar.
Direction comes from gender and the polarity of the year stem; the starting age comes from the distance to the nearest solar term. Both are conventions with variants, which is why a chart's timeline can shift by months between schools.
Luck pillars (大运) →Useful element (用神)The element a reading treats as the chart's need.
This is interpretation, not calculation. Two practitioners can agree on every field of a chart and disagree about the useful element, because the choice depends on a theory of balance rather than on the data. Any page that presents it as computed is overstating what the method can do.
Useful element (用神) →
Why five elements are drawn as a ring and a star
The generating cycle closes into a ring; the controlling cycle closes into a five-pointed star. Almost every statement in BaZi is a walk along one of these two paths.
- Generates
- Controls
Wood
Generates fire, controls earth. Read as growth and expansion.
Wood →Fire
Generates earth, controls metal. Read as expression and visibility.
Fire →Earth
Generates metal, controls water. Read as stability and storage.
Earth →Metal
Generates water, controls wood. Read as structure and decision.
Metal →Water
Generates wood, controls fire. Read as flow and adaptation.
Water →
This diagram explains structure, not outcomes. It tells you why a chart lacking earth is read alongside its fire, not what will happen to the person.
Stems and branches, one line each
The twenty-two characters every chart is built from. Learn the elements and polarities and the ten gods stop needing to be memorised.
22 characters
甲 Jia
Yang wood: tall trees, upward and unbending. Read as growth that will not be redirected.
乙 Yi
Yin wood: vines and grasses. Read as growth that adapts to whatever it climbs.
丙 Bing
Yang fire: the sun. Read as visibility that does not need an audience to exist.
丁 Ding
Yin fire: a lamp or candle. Read as warmth that is deliberate and local.
戊 Wu
Yang earth: a mountain. Read as stability that is slow to move and hard to move.
己 Ji
Yin earth: cultivated soil. Read as the kind of stability that needs tending.
庚 Geng
Yang metal: raw ore or an axe. Read as decision before refinement.
辛 Xin
Yin metal: a jewel or a blade. Read as precision, with the edge that implies.
壬 Ren
Yang water: a river or sea. Read as movement that finds the path of least resistance.
癸 Gui
Yin water: rain or mist. Read as subtle influence that is easy to overlook.
子 Zi
The zi hour, roughly 23:00–01:00. The branch where the day boundary question actually bites.
丑 Chou
Late winter earth: cold, wet, storing. The last month of the water season.
寅 Yin
The first month of spring. Holds wood, fire and earth inside one branch.
卯 Mao
Mid-spring wood: the purest wood branch, with only one hidden stem.
辰 Chen
Late spring earth: damp and fertile. One of the four storage branches.
巳 Si
Early summer fire that hides metal — the reason 巳 is read as hotter than it looks.
午 Wu
Peak fire. In the traditional clock, the noon hour of the same name.
未 Wei
Late summer earth: dry, warm, storing wood. The second storage branch.
申 Shen
Early autumn metal that already carries water — the pivot out of the fire season.
酉 You
Mid-autumn metal: single hidden stem, the sharpest and least ambiguous branch.
戌 Xu
Late autumn earth: dry and storing fire. The third storage branch.
Hai
Early winter water that hides wood — the first sign of the next spring.
A reading order that does not skip steps
Confirm the chart before reading it
Check the year boundary at 立春, the month boundary at the solar term, and whether true solar time was applied. A chart that is off by one pillar will produce a confident and wrong reading.
Start from the day master, not the animal
The zodiac animal comes from the year branch, which is the least personal part of the chart. The day master is the reference point everything else is measured against.
Read the season before the counts
The month branch sets what the chart is born into. Element counts without the season are numbers without a baseline.
Treat the ten gods as relations, not labels
A god that is helpful in one chart is a burden in another because the relation is fixed but the context is not. Never read a single god as a personality trait.
Put the chart back into time last
Luck pillars and annual cycles qualify the natal chart. They never replace it, and they are where most over-claiming happens.
FAQ
What is BaZi?
A Chinese system that converts a birth date and time into four pairs of characters — a heavenly stem and an earthly branch for the year, month, day and hour. Readings describe relations between those eight characters. The chart is calculated; the interpretation is not.
Why does BaZi use solar terms instead of calendar months?
Because the system predates the Gregorian calendar and is tied to the sun's position rather than to month numbers. The month pillar changes at one of twelve solar terms, roughly every 30 days, which is why the exact birth date and time matter so much.
What is the day master and why does it matter?
It is the stem of the day pillar. Every other character is described relative to it through the ten gods, so it functions as the chart's origin. It is a position in a structure, not a personality verdict.
Why do two BaZi calculators give different results?
Almost always one of four things: the solar term times they use, whether true solar time is applied, the rule for when the day changes at 23:00, or how the luck cycle start is rounded. This page prints all four under every result so the difference can be located rather than argued about.
Is BaZi the same as the Chinese zodiac?
No. The zodiac animal is the year branch — one character out of eight, and the least individual. Most of what a BaZi reading uses comes from the month, day and hour, which the zodiac ignores entirely.
Can a BaZi chart predict the future?
Not in any testable sense. The tradition describes structural patterns and cycles; it does not produce dated predictions that hold up to verification. This page treats it as a vocabulary for describing dispositions, and says so where the line is.
Read your chart, then read the method
The calculator prints the rules it used. If a field does not make sense, the explanation above it names the article that covers it.