Bazi and Four Pillars

Four Pillars (bazi, 八字) is a time system before it is anything else. A birth moment is written as four pairs of a stem and a branch — year, month, day, hour — eight characters in all, and every later judgement is derived from those eight. The reading is not a list of lucky and unlucky traits. It is a model of how one moment sits inside the larger cycles around it.

These eighteen essays are about the model rather than about fortune-telling technique. The first block lays out the four systems a chart is built from — positioning, time, environment and counting. The second shows how the chart is actually counted, and what “strength” means when it is measured instead of guessed. The third takes the ten gods apart: what they name, how they are told apart, and where the standard correspondences break down. The last block is honest about failure — twins with the same chart, charts that give different fates, and a theory put to a test.

If you only read three: The Logic of Bazi Reading, What the Ten Gods Mean, and Why Identical Charts Give Different Fates.