How to read a saju chart: the eight characters and your day pillar

Enter a birth date into a manseryeok (Korean almanac) app or a free saju reading and you get eight Chinese characters split into four columns. It looks like a code at first, but read in a set order it is a simple structure. The year, month, day and hour of birth are each written as two characters: those are the four pillars (saju), and with two characters per pillar you get eight characters in all (palja).

This guide walks through one example chart from start to finish: how to read the almanac table, how to find your day pillar, and how to build a reading in the usual order of day master, day pillar, five elements, ten gods and shinsal, then the zodiac animal and the year ahead. It also points out, plainly, the date boundaries where almanacs disagree.

One thing first. Saju is a cultural framework of interpretation with a long history in East Asia, not a scientifically validated personality test or a prediction. This guide treats it as a language for fun and reflection, not as grounds for decisions about health, money, marriage or career. If you want to see how the two approaches differ, read saju vs personality tests as well.

Take as an example someone born at 7:20 a.m. on 21 March 1995 (solar calendar). Enter that date and time into the free saju reading and you get the year pillar Eul-hae (乙亥), the month pillar Gi-myo (己卯), the day pillar Sin-hae (辛亥) and the hour pillar Im-jin (壬辰). In each pillar the top character is a heavenly stem (one of ten) and the bottom one an earthly branch (one of twelve).

A traditional chart is written from right to left: year, month, day, hour. So in many almanac apps the leftmost column is the hour pillar and the rightmost the year pillar. Other screens list them left to right as year, month, day, hour, so get into the habit of checking the column headings before the characters and you will not mix them up.

Each pillar stands for a different unit of time. The branch of the year pillar is your zodiac animal: a year branch of 亥, as in the example, means the Pig. The month pillar marks the season of birth, the day pillar the day and the hour pillar the two-hour period. The sixty combinations of the ten stems and twelve branches cycle through years, months, days and hours alike, which is why the same name, Sin-hae, can belong to a year, a month or a day.

All you need to find your day pillar is your solar birth date. The day pillar is a cycle that moves one step through the sixty combinations each day, so it is set by the date alone, regardless of solar terms or the lunar calendar, and you can know it without your birth time. The example’s day pillar is Sin-hae. All sixty are laid out by day master in the 60 day pillars. If you only know a lunar birthday, the day pillar follows its solar date: the mind.io free saju converts it for you when you choose “Lunar (Korean)”, and if it falls in a leap month, tick “Leap month” as well.

There are, however, three boundaries where almanacs can disagree. The first is the year. The saju year starts not on 1 January or at the lunar new year but at Ipchun, the start of spring (around 3 to 5 February), so if you were born in January or early February before Ipchun, your year pillar and animal follow the previous year. The second is the month. The month pillar changes not on the 1st but at solar terms such as Gyeongchip and Cheongmyeong. The example’s 21 March falls after that year’s Gyeongchip (6 March), so it is a 卯 month.

The third is a birth at 11 p.m. The 子 hour runs from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., straddling the change of day. This site keeps the calendar date’s day pillar for births between 23:00 and 23:59 and uses the next day’s 子 hour stem for the hour pillar (the “late 子 hour” convention). Born at 11:30 p.m. on the same day as the example, you would get a Sin-hae day with a Gyeong-ja (庚子) hour here, but an almanac that moves to the next day at 23:00 gives an Im-ja day. The hour pillar is Gyeong-ja either way; only the day pillar changes.

Beyond that, this site splits solar terms by whole days (the day a term falls on counts entirely as the new month), divides the hours on the hour exactly as entered, and does not automatically correct for longitude (true solar time, about 30 minutes in Seoul) or daylight saving time. If another app gives you a different day or month pillar, check first whether your birthday falls on a solar term, in the 11 p.m. hour or in a daylight saving period. More often than not, neither is wrong: they follow different schools and settings.

You do not need to memorize all eight characters. A reading starts from the stem of the day pillar, the day master (日干), because saju treats the day master as “you” and reads the other seven characters by how they relate to it. The example’s day master is 辛, Metal by element, so it is the Sin-geum day master. Tradition pictures 辛 Metal as a jewel or a finely honed blade. Readings for all ten are gathered in the ten day masters.

Next, look at the character just below it, the day branch (日支). It is said to stand for the place closest to you, so day-pillar readings have long described temperament and relationship habits through the pairing of the day master and the day branch. The example’s Sin-hae day sets Metal above Water (亥). Each day-pillar page also lists values that are calculated rather than interpreted, such as the stems hidden in the branch and the twelve life stages.

With just these two steps you can follow half of most saju readings. Keep in mind that the same day pillar comes round every sixty days, so roughly one person in sixty shares yours. Rather than pinning someone down by their day pillar, use the reading as a question to check against yourself: “Am I really like that?”

The third step is the five elements. Each of the eight characters belongs to Wood (木), Fire (火), Earth (土), Metal (金) or Water (水). Counting the example gives 乙 (Wood) and 亥 (Water), 己 (Earth) and 卯 (Wood), 辛 (Metal) and 亥 (Water), 壬 (Water) and 辰 (Earth): Wood 2, Fire 0, Earth 2, Metal 1, Water 3. This site’s result screen counts the basic element of each of the eight characters once in the same way and shows the totals as bars.

These numbers are a simple map of which energies stand out. They leave out the stems hidden inside the branches and the way the season of birth strengthens or weakens an element, so a Fire count of 0 does not mean there is no Fire at all. In fact, spreading eight characters over five elements very often leaves one or two empty. How to read a missing or an abundant element is covered in missing or excess elements in saju.

The fourth step is the ten gods. They are ten names given to every other character according to its element relation to the day master and whether the two share yin or yang. For the example’s 辛 Metal day master, the year stem 乙 Wood is Indirect Wealth, the month stem 己 Earth is Indirect Resource and the hour stem 壬 Water is Hurting Officer. The names sound dramatic, but they simply sort relationships: what you manage, what supports you, what you express.

The fifth step is shinsal, names attached to particular combinations of branches, such as Peach Blossom or Traveling Horse. Their vivid names make them easy to take more seriously than they deserve. Shinsal are closer to seasoning than to the core of a reading, and schools differ slightly on how to find them. The rules and the common myths are set out in tables in the saju glossary.

Finally, look outward. Your animal opens the traditional relations (trines, pairings, clashes) in the zodiac compatibility chart; to set two people’s day masters and elements side by side, try saju compatibility; and for the year ahead, see the 2027 new-year fortune. If you are wondering about samjae, the three-year stretch said to return for each animal, read samjae by zodiac animal.

Q. Which column of a saju chart do I read first? A. Start with the day master, the top character of the day pillar. It stands for “you,” so find it first and then widen out to the day branch, the element count, the ten gods and shinsal, and finally your animal and the year. Column order differs between apps, so check the year, month, day and hour headings first.

Q. What is the difference between the day master and the day pillar? A. The day master is one character; the day pillar is two. The day pillar is the stem-and-branch pair of your birth day, and its top character, the stem, is the day master. So there are ten day masters and sixty day pillars, with six day pillars sharing each day master.

Q. Do people born on the same day share a day pillar? A. Yes: people born on the same date share a day pillar. Some almanacs count an 11 p.m. birth as the next day, though, and sharing the year, month and hour pillars as well would take the same year, the same solar-term month and the same two-hour period. So the same day pillar can still come with different eight characters.

Q. Can saju tell me exactly what my personality is like? A. No. Saju is a cultural framework set by your birth date, not a tool that measures how you behave now. People with the same chart live very different lives. If you are curious about your current tendencies, take the answer-based Big Five test and set the two results side by side.

The same characters can be read differently by different schools and different readers. Rather than memorizing one reading as the answer, it is healthier to pick, from several interpretations, the questions that speak to you now.

If an ominous shinsal name or a warning to “be careful this year” has left you anxious, you can say no to anyone who uses that worry to sell talismans or expensive rituals. The more someone rushes you or the more it costs, the more you should talk it over first with family or someone you trust.

Enjoy saju lightly as material for reflection, and make important decisions about health, money and relationships on facts and expert advice. The plain fact that people born on the same day do not live the same life is the first thing to remember when you read one.