How to read a bazi chart

Four pillars, one each for the year, month, day and hour of birth. Each pillar is a heavenly stem over an earthly branch: the stem is one of ten characters carrying an element and a polarity, the branch is one of twelve carrying an animal and, hidden inside it, one to three more stems. Chinese charts print the pillars right to left, year on the right; English tools print them left to right, and so does this page.

The year branch is where the zodiac animal comes from: Snake here. Notice how little of the chart that is. One of eight characters, and the one shared with everyone born the same year. Everything a reading actually says comes from the other seven and from how they sit around one character in particular.

The stem of the day pillar is the day master (日主), and in the Ziping method it stands for the person. Every other character in the chart is read by what it does to this one. In this chart the day master is Ding 丁, yin fire.

That the day stem stands for the person is itself the method's founding move. The older Tang-era reading, the one attached to Li Xuzhong's name, took the year pillar as the self; the Song-era reform credited to Xu Ziping moved the self to the day stem, and the Yuanhai Ziping, the manual that carries his name, is built on that one change. Everything on this page follows from it.

The polarity matters as much as the element. Yang fire is the sun and the bonfire; yin fire is the lamp and the hearth, fire that needs fuel and gives close light rather than heat at a distance. The ten stems each carry a picture like this, and the day master page gives all ten. What you take from this step is the one character the rest of the reading measures against. Nothing else in the chart has a meaning yet.

This is the judgment the whole method turns on, and the one practitioners argue about most. Three questions, in the order Wei Qianli's 1935 textbook gives them: does the season favor the day master's element (得令, de ling, holding the command), does the element have roots in the branches (得地, de di, holding ground), and do the other stems support it or drain it (得势, de shi, holding force).

Here the month branch is Zi, the Rat, which is the depth of winter and belongs to water. Fire born in a water month is out of season before anything else is counted. The roots are thin: the year branch Si is fire by its main qi, but the year branch is the lightest position of the four, and the day branch Wei holds fire only as a secondary hidden stem. The support is real but narrow: the month stem Bing is fire beside fire, and the hour branch Mao is wood, which feeds it.

Modern practice turns those three questions into one weighted count of the positions that help the day master. On this chart that count is 31.2 out of 100, and anything under half reads weak. It is not close to the line, so the verdict would survive most alternative weightings. The position-by-position arithmetic, and the weights behind it, are worked on the day master page and published on the methodology page; the point of this step is the verdict, because step three cannot begin without it.

A weak day master wants feeding; a strong one wants draining. That single rule, stated in the Yuanhai Ziping and repeated by every manual since, converts the verdict into a prescription. The element that generates the day master and the day master's own element are the two that help a weak chart. For a strong chart it is the reverse: the element it produces, the element it controls, and the element that controls it.

The day master here is weak fire, so the favorable elements are fire and wood: wood because it feeds fire, fire because company strengthens it. The unfavorable ones are earth, metal, water. This is what the tradition calls the useful god (用神) and its companions, and it is the single most important output of a reading, because everything that follows, every ten god, every luck pillar, every year, is judged by whether it brings the chart what it needs or takes it away.

Two cautions the five elements page spells out. Counting how many of each element you have is not this step and does not substitute for it: a chart can hold three fire characters and still be weak fire if they are all out of season. And the word useful god means something different in the pattern-school texts, which is one of the reasons two books can read the same chart differently.

Now the rest of the chart gets a vocabulary. Every character is one of five relations to the day master: it feeds it (Resource), it is the same element (Companion), the day master produces it (Output), the day master controls it (Wealth), or it controls the day master (Influence). Polarity splits each of the five in two, giving the ten gods. Stems get the exact god; branches are read by their main hidden stem and take the group.

Read the table against step three and the chart starts to speak. The year stem is Eating God, what the day master produces and enjoys producing; the month stem is Rob Wealth, fire beside fire, company that in a weak chart counts as help; the hour stem is Seven Killings, water controlling fire at the same polarity, which the tradition reads as pressure rather than order. Among the branches, the hour branch's resource is the one that feeds this chart, and the month branch's influence is the one that presses on it.

What the labels do not do is deliver verdicts on their own. Seven Killings is not a curse and Eating God is not a blessing; each is read by whether the chart can use it, which is exactly what the previous step settled. A weak fire chart with pressure in the hour and no Wealth star among the stems reads very differently from a strong one carrying the same labels. The ten gods page walks the same table on a chart with the opposite verdict.

The four branches sit on a ring of twelve, and pairs of positions on that ring have fixed relations: six clashes, six harmonies, six harms, the punishments, and the trines. Before timing enters, a reader checks every pair of natal branches for one of these, because a relation inside the chart is permanent weather.

This chart carries two: a harm between the month branch Zi and the day branch Wei and a punishment between the month branch Zi and the hour branch Mao. Both involve the month branch, the Rat, which is also the character that made the day master weak in step two. When one position keeps turning up, that is itself a finding: the tradition would spend its attention there, on the season and the pressure it brings, rather than spreading it evenly across the chart.

The tables, with what each relation has meant in the classical commentaries and the two stars this site marks, are on the branch relations page. What you carry forward from this step is a short list of positions under stress, because the years will keep striking them.

Everything so far is fixed at birth. Timing enters through the luck pillars (大运), ten-year chapters that walk the chart forward or backward through the sixty-pair cycle from the month pillar, and through the current year, which is read against the chart the same way. The classical weighting is explicit that the decade outranks the year.

This chart's year stem is yin on a female chart, so the pillars walk forward, and the count to the next month-opening term (Xiaohan, Minor Cold) gives a start at nominal age 9, in 1997. How that age is counted is written out on the methodology page. From there each decade is judged by the same rule as step three: does its stem and branch bring the chart fire and wood, or earth, metal, water.

The decade the method rates highest is 2017–2026, a Mao decade whose wood feeds the weak fire. The decade after it turns to earth and metal and reads unfavorable. Whether that matches the life is the calculator's business, and the hub's backtest exists so you can check it. What matters for the reading order is that the verdict on each decade was already determined at step three; the decade only says when.

A single year is read the same way, in the same order. Take 2026, Bing-Wu 丙午, the Horse year. Element first: the stem is Rob Wealth, fire for a chart that wants fire, and the branch is the Horse, fire again. Then the relations: the Horse clashes with the natal Rat in the month branch, and combines with the Goat in the day branch. So the year brings the element the chart wants and, at the same time, strikes the position step five already flagged. A reading holds both, in that order: what the year gives, then where it lands.

Everything above is the balance school, the reading taught since the 1930s textbooks and the one our calculator implements. The pattern school takes the same eight characters and begins not with the day master's strength but with the month command, the main hidden stem of the month branch, and names the chart after the god it produces. Here that stem is Gui against a Ding day master, which makes it a Seven Killings chart.

Naming the pattern is mechanical, and that is as far as this page goes. What a pattern reader does next, judging whether the pattern is intact and what supports or breaks it, is a body of rules this site has not implemented and will not fake. The pattern school page describes the method in its own terms and says plainly why we chose the other one.

The order above is checkable at every step: the characters are arithmetic, the labels are table lookups, the strength count uses published weights, and any two readers of the same school should reach the same verdict on a chart that is not near the line. That is what makes the reading auditable, and it is more than most English sources offer.

What the order cannot do is prove that the reading means anything. Bazi has no controlled evidence behind it; it is a thousand-year-old interpretive system, taken here as a cultural lens and shown honestly. Use it to see how the tradition would read a life, not to make medical, financial or legal decisions, and treat a reading that skipped a step, or that never told you which school it was using, as guessing.