What is Saju?
Origin: Korea and China
Saju, also known as the Four Pillars of Destiny (BaZi in Chinese), turns the year, month, day and hour of your birth into two characters each, for eight characters in all. In Korean it's often called saju palja, “four pillars, eight characters.” Each of the eight characters carries one of five qualities, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal or Water, and they support or hold each other back.
The anchor is the first character of your birth day, known as the Day Master. It stands for you, and your personality, money and relationships are read from how the other seven characters relate to it.
How is it calculated?
- 1
Set up the four pillars
The year, month, day and hour each become a pair of characters called a stem and a branch. The year doesn't turn over on January 1 but at the start of spring (Ipchun, around February 4). The months also change with the solar terms.
- 2
Find your Day Master
The first character of your birth day stands for you. Its element and its yin or yang become the yardstick for everything else.
- 3
Read the relationships
Each of the other characters is sorted into one of ten types, depending on whether it supports you, pressures you, is supported by you or is pressured by you. Money, career, learning and competition each fall into these types.
- 4
Follow the flow
The flow that shifts every ten years is called the Luck Pillars. They run in opposite directions for men and women, so we need your gender to calculate them.
What it reads well
- It looks closely at timing. Of the four, Saju is the only one that can say what kind of flow runs from one age to another.
- It separates areas of life. Money, career and relationships each map to different characters, so it can tell apart the areas that go well from the ones that get stuck, even within one person.
- Add your time of birth and it gets much more detailed.
What it can't see
- It needs the exact moment each solar term begins, but Crossfate only works out the date each term falls on. If you were born on the very day a solar term begins, your birth month may be counted differently from the true one.
- Without your gender, we can't calculate the Luck Pillars.
- People born at the same time get the same eight characters.
How Crossfate uses it
At Crossfate, Saju weighs in on all nineteen areas we read. It's especially useful in the timing areas, where it fills in what the other systems can't say.