What Does Saju Mean?
The complete guide to Korea's most enduring system of personal analysis — how it works, where it comes from, and what it reveals.
What does Saju mean?
Saju (사주, 四柱) means “Four Pillars” in Korean. It organizes a birth moment into Year, Month, Day, and Hour pillars; each pillar pairs a Heavenly Stem with an Earthly Branch, creating the eight-character chart also called Bazi.
The essays below stay with structure: how the four pillars are assembled, how the Five Elements are counted, and why a missing birth time leaves the Hour Pillar out. They do not invent a personal reading for a visitor who has not entered a date.
The free calculator on this site applies the same calendar rules and shows the stems, branches, and element counts. Signed-in consultation is separate: it uses the calculated chart plus retrieved source material, and it does not ask the model to invent missing theory.
Later essays cover the same boundary in more detail: what a calculator can show without an hour, how Korean Saju and Chinese Bazi share a calendar backbone, and how the twenty-four solar terms fix the Month Pillar. Traditional vocabulary is labeled as tradition, not as a scientifically validated prediction.
Now that you know Saju,
apply it to yourself.
Calibrated to your real life — a reading made for you alone.
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