You already know your twelve.
This is your sixty.

Start with what you already have

If you know you're a Leo, you know one thing about yourself: the month you were born. Twelve signs, and roughly six hundred million people share yours.

Saju reads four things instead of one — the year, the month, the day, and the hour. Not the date on the calendar, but where the sun actually was. That's why it needs your birth time, and why it's fussy about it.

Four pillars, eight characters

Each of the four gets a pair of characters: one on top, one below. Four pairs, eight characters. In Korean that's 사주팔자 — saju, four pillars; palja, eight characters.

The small character on the left of each box is its element. We'll come back to those.

One of those eight is you

The top character of the day pillar is your Day Master. Everything else in the chart is read in relation to it — what feeds it, what drains it, what it can't stop reaching for.

In the chart above it's 丙 — Yang Fire. Not a candle. The sun: it doesn't try to warm you, it just does, and it can't be selective about who it reaches. There is another Fire in the sixty — 丁, the candle flame — and it is nothing like this one. Same element. Opposite person.

Where sixty comes from

The top character of each pillar comes from a set of ten — the five elements, each in a yin and a yang form. The bottom comes from a set of twelve — the animals you may already know from the Chinese zodiac.

Ten and twelve pair off, but only like with like: yang with yang, yin with yin. Half the combinations can never happen. What is left is sixty, and the cycle runs sixty years before it repeats.

Twelve signs sort the world into twelve boxes. Sixty is five times finer — and that is only the first of your eight characters.

The other seven are the room

Your Day Master doesn't stand alone. The seven characters around it are the conditions it was born into — the season, the hour, the year's weather.

Five elements, and what a zero means

Every one of the eight characters is made of one of five elements:

They are not a list. They are a loop — and that loop is the whole engine.

Count the five in your eight characters and you get a shape. The chart above has three Water, two Fire, two Metal, one Wood — and no Earth at all.

A zero isn't a flaw. In the old language earth is ground — weight, patience, the thing that holds a shape while nothing is happening. Someone with none of it isn't flighty. They have nowhere to set anything down. Everything stays in their hands. So they may find that resting feels like falling, and that they reach hardest for people who are simply steady.

What saju does, and what it doesn't

• It describes weather, not events. A year can lean toward something. It doesn't schedule anyone's life.
• It doesn't tell you who to marry. It tells you the shape of the seat beside you — and who tends to land in it.
• It doesn't change — but you're not finished. Your eight characters were fixed at your first breath, and no reading will move them. What they give you is the name of what you're short of. Knowing it is the start; spending your life filling it in is the rest. The chart is the map, not the walk.
• It's not a verdict. A chart is a description of what you're made of. What you build with it is yours.

Why the hour matters so much

Two of your eight characters come from the hour you were born. Get the hour wrong and you get a quarter of the chart wrong — and the hour pillar is the one that carries what you become later.

It's fussier than it looks. Korea runs its clocks on a meridian that sits east of Seoul, so a Seoul birth is about 32 minutes off from where the sun actually was. Most sites skip that. We don't — we correct for the real longitude of wherever you were born, and for the equation of time on your exact date.

What if you don't know your birth time?

Most people don't, off the top of their head. It is almost always written down somewhere:

• United States — the long-form birth certificate carries the time of birth. The short form usually doesn't. Order the long form from the vital records office of the state you were born in.
• Elsewhere — hospital records, a baby book, your mother. Someone in the room looked at a clock.

If you truly can't find it, the other three pillars still hold — six of your eight characters are yours regardless, and the Day Master is one of them. But the hour pillar is the one that carries what you turn into later, and a guess there is worse than nothing. Better to leave it out than to invent it.