Saju (사주) means "four pillars." It's the Korean birth chart: your birth year, month, day and hour, each written as two characters. Eight characters in total, which is why Koreans also call it 팔자 (palja), "the eight characters."
Each pillar has a heavenly stem on top and an earthly branch below. There are ten stems and twelve branches, and they pair up in a cycle of sixty. Every stem and branch carries one of five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal or water. Your year branch is the zodiac animal people already know. It's one character out of eight.
The stem of your birth day is your day master. Saju treats it as the self, and reads every other character in relation to it: what supports you, what drains you, what you go after. There are ten day masters:
| Yang Wood | Everyone leans on you. |
| Yin Wood | People think you're easygoing. Then you get exactly what you wanted. |
| Yang Fire | The room gets warmer when you walk in. |
| Yin Fire | Not the loudest in the room, but the one everybody ends up next to. |
| Yang Earth | You don't budge, you don't explain, and you don't need to. |
| Yin Earth | You take care of everyone, including their problems. |
| Yang Metal | You cut straight through the nonsense. |
| Yin Metal | Polished, precise, impossible to impress. |
| Yang Water | Easygoing on the surface, a lot going on underneath. |
| Yin Water | You feel the mood before anyone speaks. |
A chart isn't lucky or unlucky. Readers count how much of each element you have, notice what's missing or too loud, and look for the element that would even things out. Then they read each new year against your chart: a year can support you, push you, or shake up one area of your life.
Saju runs on the sun, not the calendar. The year starts at 입춘 (around February 4), months change on solar terms, and the hour depends on where the sun was where you were born. In Korea that means a correction of about 30 minutes, plus the daylight-saving years Korea used in the 1950s and 1980s. A good calculator handles all of that. Ours does.
Saju (사주, "four pillars") is the Korean form of the East Asian birth-chart system. Your birth year, month, day and hour each become a pillar of two characters, eight in total. Readers look at the balance of the five elements across those eight characters and how they interact.
No. The zodiac animal is just one of the eight characters (your birth year's branch). Saju uses all eight, and the most important one is your day stem, called your day master.
The heavenly stem of the day you were born. It's treated as "you" in the chart: one of ten types, from Yang Wood to Yin Water. Everything else in the chart is read in relation to it.
It sets the hour pillar, two of your eight characters. Without it a reader works from six characters, which still works but is less precise.
At 입춘 (ipchun), the start of spring on the solar calendar, around February 4. Not January 1, and not Lunar New Year. Months also change on solar terms, not on calendar months.
Compatibility between two charts. Koreans traditionally checked it before marriage; today it's used for partners, friends and coworkers alike.
No. It's a traditional system, taken seriously as culture and used by many Koreans for reflection, especially around the new year. Grandma Choi's readings are for reflection and entertainment.
Free, no account, nothing stored on our server. Grandma Choi adds one blunt line.
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