八 BaZi, the Four Pillars of Chinese Astrology

Eight characters, four pillars

BaZi means eight characters. The name says exactly what the method is: a complete chart holds in eight signs, and there are never any more than that.

Those eight characters are arranged in four pillars, which are the four coordinates of a birth: the year, the month, the day and the hour. Each pillar carries two characters, a heavenly stem above and an earthly branch below. Four pillars of two characters make the eight of the name.

This is the first thing to grasp before any reading. BaZi does not reduce a birth to a single image. It describes it through a four storey structure, each storey carrying its own pair, and it is the relationship between those eight characters that makes the chart, never one character taken alone.

The birth time deserves a mention of its own. Without it, the hour pillar cannot be set, and the chart stays partial: six characters instead of eight. This is not an impossible reading, the three other pillars keep their meaning, but it knows itself incomplete and must say so. The question of which time is used is covered on the page devoted to true solar time.

The Day Master, the point of reference

Among the eight characters, one holds a place the others do not. The heavenly stem of the day pillar is called the Day Master, and it is from there that the whole of the rest of the chart is read.

The consequence runs deeper than it looks. A character of the chart means nothing in itself: it means something for that Day Master. The same stem, the same branch, do not play the same part depending on the reference they are brought back to. This is what separates a BaZi chart from a simple list of correspondences, and what explains that two people can share several characters without sharing the same reading.

Each of the ten heavenly stems therefore has its page in this grimoire, and each of them devotes a section to what it means to be born with that stem on the day pillar. They are, in order, Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin, Ren and Gui.

The balance of the five elements

The eight characters spread out over the five elements. Their balance, or their imbalance, is the first reading made of a chart, before any detail.

A chart is not meant to be balanced. Some concentrate four or five characters on a single element, others leave one missing. These are facts of structure, not flaws: they describe where a person naturally leans and where they have to go looking. The five elements, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, each have their page, with what they describe, the cycles that link them, and what their excess as well as their absence produces.

The ten stems and the twelve branches

The two rows that make up the pillars are not interchangeable. The heavenly stems occupy the upper line, the earthly branches the lower one, and a pillar is always the meeting of the two.

The twelve branches carry the animal names that are known outside BaZi: the Rat, the Ox, the Tiger, the Rabbit, the Dragon, the Snake, the Horse, the Goat, the Monkey, the Rooster, the Dog and the Pig. Each one has its page among the twelve signs. The name of the animal and the name of the branch are two distinct things, and one is not deduced from the other: the branch of the Ox is called Chou.

The way stems and branches assemble to date the pillars belongs to the sexagenary cycle. The relations that branches hold with one another, alliances as well as oppositions, are covered on the page about branch combinations.

The decades of Da Yun

The birth chart does not move. The eight characters are set once and for all, and nothing replaces them afterwards.

Above that fixed chart run the decades of Da Yun. They do not change the chart: they light up a period, by bringing forward one balance or another already present in the eight characters. The distinction matters, because it fixes the posture of BaZi: we do not read a future written somewhere else, we read a structure under a lighting that moves. How these decades work, and the approximations they carry, are detailed on the Da Yun page.

What BaZi is not

The most widespread confusion is worth naming straight away: BaZi is not the annual Chinese horoscope of the twelve animals.

The annual horoscope keeps only the branch of the year. That is one character out of eight. Everything BaZi draws from the month, the day and the hour, everything it draws from the heavenly stems, and above all the reference to the Day Master, is missing from it. Saying that someone is a Tiger or a Goat names one eighth of their chart and ignores the rest, starting with the pillar the method gives the most weight to.

That is also why this grimoire offers no compatibility between two people based on their year animal alone. Such a reading compares two characters and leaves the other fourteen aside.

The school followed in this grimoire

There are several ways of reading the Four Pillars, and a page that does not say which one it follows leaves the reader facing incompatible tables.

This grimoire follows the classical reading of the Four Pillars: the one that starts from the Day Master and qualifies the other characters in relation to it, by means of the Ten Gods. The polarities that run through the whole system, two phases and not two genders, are set out on the Yin and Yang page.

The thirty four pages of the module fall into three families and a set of methods: the twelve signs for the earthly branches, the five elements for the shared substance, the ten heavenly stems for the upper line of the pillars, and the method pages for what ties all of it together.