Bazi explained, how it relates to the Chinese zodiac, and much more.
The Four Pillars of Destiny, also known as Bazi (八字), is a Chinese fortune telling technique that attempts to calculate your fate based on the day and time you were born. Your birth chart will consist of four pillars/columns, one for the year, one for the month, one for the day, and one for the time. Each column will have two characters, which makes eight characters in total that will be used for telling your future. To get your bazi, you can use a calculator online.
You have likely heard of the Chinese zodiac, and these concepts are related. In fact, your zodiac animal will be associated with one of the eight characters. For example, if you were born on the year of the rat, this will correspond with 子, which means that one of the characters for your year will be 子.
The top character of each column will be from the set of the heavenly stems (天干), which consist of 甲 (jia), 乙(yi), 丙(bing), 丁(ding), 戊(wu), 己 (ji), 庚 (geng), 辛 (xin), 壬 (ren), 癸 (gui). Each of these elements have an element and a yin/yang associated with them. For example, 甲 is yang wood, while 乙 is yin wood.
The bottom character of each column will be from the set of the earthly branches (地支), which consist of 子 (zi), 丑 (chou), 寅 (yin), 卯 (mao), 辰 (chen), 巳 (si), 午 (wu), 未 (wei), 申 (shen), 酉 (you), 戌 (xu), 亥 (hai). Likewise, each of these elements have an element and a yin/yang associated with them as well. For instance, 子 is yang water, while 丑 is yin earth.
Before proceeding further, I highly suggest familiarizing yourself with the relationships between the wuxing (五行), also known as the five elements, 金 (metal), 木 (wood), 水 (water), 火 (fire), 土 (earth). Place particular focus with the 生 (generating) and 剋 (overcoming) cycles. You can check out the wuxing article on Wikipedia for reference.
Once you have your birth chart ready, you can start doing your analysis. The heavenly stem of your day pillar, commonly referred to as your day master (日主), would represent yourself. Most analyses will be in relation to the day master.
Gods and Spirits
This is probably the most straightforward way to analyze your birth chart. There are many charts online that you can use as reference for finding out which gods and spirits play a role in your chart. There are probably several dozens of them, but the ones I see that are most commonly used are ones like 天乙貴人, 文昌貴人, 驛馬, 華蓋, and 桃花. If any of these are present in your chart, find out how they impact your life. Given my understanding, the gods mentioned in Bazi are not gods in the Western sense. Rather, they are more like energies.
Strength of Your Day Master
If your chart has a bunch of elements that are the same element as your day master or generate your day master, then your day master would be considered strong. If your chart has a bunch of elements that overcome your day master, or if your day master generates or overcomes a lot of elements in your chart, then your day master will be considered weak. Whether your day master is strong or weak can play a factor in what elements can be auspicious for you.
The Ten Gods (十神)
Depending on the polarity and the elements of the other characters in your chart, each character will have a god associated with it depending on your day master. The presence of these “gods” can give insights to a person’s personality, such as their creativity and proclivity for wealth. There are different interactions with some of these “gods,” so aspects can be magnified or diminished depending on other “gods” that are present in the chart. Knowing what each of the ten gods represent and how they affect each other is crucial for analyzing a bazi chart, so pay extra attention to studying this.
| A is day master and B is the character | Different Polarity | Same Polarity |
| B overcomes A | 正官 (Direct Officer) | 七殺 (Seven Killings) |
| B generates A | 正印 (Direct Resource) | 偏印 (Indirect Resource) |
| A, B are same elements | 劫財 (Rob Wealth) | 比肩 (Friend) |
| A generates B | 傷官 (Hurting Officer) | 食神 (Eating God) |
| A overcomes B | 正財 (Direct Wealth) | 偏財 (Indirect Wealth) |
To illustrate how the “gods” interact with each other. I’ll give a brief example. For a man whose day master is metal, he might generate a Hurting Officer, which is also responsible for creativity. Think of a Hurting Officer as someone who’s impulsive in personality and lacks a filter. He might spout the most unique ideas you’ve ever heard of, but at the same time his lack of filter can also cause him to say things that inadvertently hurt those around him. In this case, our hurting officer has an element of water, and water in turn can generate wood, which is the man’s wealth element, signaling how creativity can be channeled for generating wealth.
However, the Hurting Officer (the impulsive element), which is water in this case, might be overcome by the Direct Resource, which is earth in this case. The Direct Resource can symbolize logical and conservative thinking, indicating that over-analyzing a problem can overcome and kill our creative urges that we have.
If you can read Classical Chinese, check out 淵海子平, where Xu Ziping goes in detail explaining what each of the gods represent and their interactions with each other.
Favorable and Unfavorable Elements
Once you understand a chart well enough, you will be able to tell which elements would be good for a chart and which elements would be unfavorable for a chart. For example, water might be a favorable element for someone with a weak wood day master, because water helps generate wood. Someone whose favorable element is water might do well in the north, or finding a career that is associated with water, such as working on a ship.
Keep in mind that this is just an example, and someone with a weak wood day master might have a favorable element that isn’t water. Knowing your favorable element can help you decide between two choices such as where to live and what job to take.
Luck Pillars
Throughout your life, there will likely be ups and downs. How does the Bazi system account for this? There is a luck pillar (大運) for every 10 years of your life, as well as a 流年 for every year of your life. You can combine these with your birth chart and analyze the relationships with each other to find out your fortune for different phases of your life.
Combinations and Clashes
Sometimes, there will be characters that can combine, such as 甲 and 己, into another stronger element. Other times, there can be characters that can clash with each other, such as 子 and 午. As a result, this can impact the effects of the “gods” mentioned in previous sections.
Special Structures
In rare cases, your chart might be built in a certain way that is special, such as all four of your heavenly stems being a certain character or a day master that is abnormally strong or weak. In exceptional cases like these, the classic texts are there to discuss how these special cases can affect the individual.
After the Basics
Once you’ve grasped the fundamentals of the previous sections, you can start practicing it, by comparing the life experiences of an individual with their birth chart. However, I would still heavily discourage fortune telling at this stage, because what you say about their birth chart can have unintended consequences for the person you are practicing it on. It is important to emphasize that at the end of the day, the Four PIllars of Destiny are merely a tool that you can use to help you or others make decisions. You should not let this fully replace other steps of the decision process and let it fully control you.
Learning bazi will allow you to be more acquainted with Chinese metaphysics, and will help speed up the process of learning other related concepts such as feng shui, divination, and traditional Chinese medicine.