What Is Korean Saju? The Four Pillars, Explained Simply

What Does Saju Mean?

Saju (사주) is a Korean word that means four pillars. Each pillar stands for one part of your birth information: the year, the month, the day and the hour you were born.

Every pillar is written with two characters, one called a heavenly stem and one called an earthly branch. Since there are four pillars and each has two characters, the whole chart is sometimes called the eight characters, or palja (팔자) in Korean.

What Are Stems and Branches?

There are 10 heavenly stems. They come in pairs of five elements, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, and each element has a Yang version and a Yin version.

There are also 12 earthly branches, and these are linked to the familiar zodiac animals you may have heard of. Stems and branches combine together in a repeating pattern that cycles through 60 steps before it starts again.

What Is the Day Master?

The Day Master is the heavenly stem of your day pillar. In Korean saju, this single character is treated as a stand in for you, the self at the center of the chart.

Everything else in the chart is read by comparing it to the Day Master. These relationships are grouped into five families sometimes called the ten gods: Self and Peers, Output, Wealth, Power, and Resource. Each family describes a different kind of energy connecting to your core self.

How Do the Five Elements Work Together?

The five elements are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, and they interact in two main ways. One way is a feeding cycle, where Wood feeds Fire, Fire makes Earth, Earth bears Metal, Metal carries Water, and Water feeds Wood again.

The other way is a controlling cycle, where Wood controls Earth, Earth controls Water, Water controls Fire, Fire controls Metal, and Metal controls Wood. Together these cycles help explain how the different parts of a saju chart support or balance each other.

Why Don't Saju Years Match the Calendar?

A saju year does not start on January 1. Instead, it begins at Ipchun, the Start of Spring, which usually falls around February 4. If you are born in late January or early February, your saju year might be different from your calendar year.

In the same way, saju months do not line up with regular calendar months. They begin at solar terms, which are fixed points tied to the sun's position rather than the date on a calendar.

How Can I Find My Own Four Pillars?

To build an accurate chart, Korean saju practice converts your birth time into local solar time at the place you were born. This step accounts for historical time zones and daylight saving changes, since these can shift the exact hour.

Because of this careful conversion, the easiest way to find your own day pillar and Day Master is to enter your birth date, time and place on this site. It will automatically adjust everything to local solar time for you.

Once you know your pillars, you can also look at your ten year luck cycles, called daeun, along with yearly and monthly pillars. These add extra timing themes on top of your base chart, showing how different years and decades may feel different in tone.

Questions people ask

More guides