The Chinese mirror
BaZi means eight characters. Your birth is written as four pillars, one each for the year, month, day and hour, and each pillar holds two characters: a heavenly stem above and an earthly branch below. Those eight are the whole chart, and everything else is read out of the relationships between them.
The character that matters most is the heavenly stem of the day pillar, called the day master. It stands for you. It is one of ten, a yin or yang form of wood, fire, earth, metal or water, and every other element in the chart is judged by how it treats that one. This page uses the solar calendar the tradition actually uses, so the year turns at Lichun in early February rather than at the lunar new year.
- Day master
- The heavenly stem of your day pillar. The single character that represents you in the chart.
- Heavenly stem and earthly branch
- The two halves of each pillar. Ten stems and twelve branches, cycling together over sixty combinations. The branches are the animals most people know.
- Hidden stems
- Each branch conceals one to three further stems. They are why two people with the same animal can read completely differently.
- Ten Gods
- The ten possible relationships between the day master and everything else: resource, output, wealth, officer, companion, each in a direct and an indirect form.
How to read the four pillars
- Four columns
- Your year, month, day and hour, left to right. Together they are the eight characters that give BaZi its name: two per pillar.
- Top and bottom of each column
- The top character is a heavenly stem, the bottom an earthly branch. The branch is the animal most people know.
- The day column's top character
- Your Day Master. It stands for you, and the whole chart is read in relation to it rather than on its own.
- The bars underneath
- How the five elements balance across all eight characters. A tall bar is an element you have a lot of, which is not automatically good.
Start here. Start with the Day Master, the top of the third column. Then look at the bars and ask which element is missing rather than which is tallest.