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.