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Enter your birth date and time to instantly see your Four Pillars of Destiny (四柱) — the Heavenly Stems, Earthly Branches, and Five Elements of your birth chart. Free, no sign-up.
Saju, literally "Four Pillars," is an East Asian system that organizes a birth moment into four columns — year, month, day, and hour. Each pillar holds two characters, so a complete chart (명식) is eight characters, which is why the same system is called Bazi ("Eight Characters") in Chinese. The four pillars are read from the traditional lunisolar calendar rather than the Gregorian date alone.
Each pillar pairs one of the 10 Heavenly Stems (天干) with one of the 12 Earthly Branches (地支). The stems cycle through the five elements in yin and yang form, while the twelve branches correspond to the familiar zodiac animals. Together the stem–branch cycle repeats every 60 combinations, the classical sexagenary cycle used to label years, months, days, and hours.
Every stem and branch maps to one of the Five Elements (五行) — Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. A Saju chart is often summarized by counting how many of each element appear across its eight characters. This elemental breakdown is a structural description of the chart, not a prediction.
The hour pillar depends on the exact clock time of birth, which makes the birth time the most sensitive input. Because standard time zones and daylight saving do not match the sun's real position at a given longitude, traditional practice uses "true solar time" (진태양시) — an adjustment based on the birthplace's longitude and the reference meridian. This calculator supports that correction so the hour pillar reflects local solar time.