Every Bazi calculator prints a row of extra names under the four pillars — Peach Blossom, Travelling Horse, Canopy, Nobleman, Goat Blade — and they are the part of a chart people remember first. They are also the part beginners overrate most: one Peach Blossom and the reading turns to romance; one Travelling Horse and it turns to emigration. This page covers what these symbolic stars (神煞, shen sha) actually are, how to look up the four you will meet most often, and where they belong in the order of reading a chart — which is after the Ten Gods, not before.
Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗数), usually translated Purple Star Astrology, is the second great system of Chinese destiny reading, next to Bazi. It uses the same raw material — the date and hour of birth — but does something very different with it. Bazi turns the birth moment into eight characters and studies how they interact. Zi Wei Dou Shu draws a board of twelve palaces, one for each area of life, and drops more than a hundred named stars into those palaces. Reading the chart means asking which stars landed in which palace. If you have ever looked at a Western birth chart with its twelve houses, the board will look familiar; the way it is filled is not.
A Bazi chart never changes. The four pillars are fixed at birth, and What Is Bazi has so far read a static chart: eight characters, one Day Master, ten relation labels. That is exactly where a beginner gets stuck next — if the chart is fixed for life, where does timing come from? Why one smooth decade and one hard one? The moving parts that answer this are the luck pillars: da yun (大运), the ten-year cycle, and liu nian (流年), the year itself.
Bazi Day Master ended at the seam where a chart actually gets read: once the day stem is fixed and its strength judged, the remaining characters are interpreted through the ten gods (十神, shishen) — the labels a calculator prints beside every stem, and the first place a beginner gets stuck. Ten names, but not ten things to memorize: each one is the product of a single two-step rule — five element relations crossed with two polarities — and this page derives them and charts them rather than asking you to learn them by rote.
In a Bazi (八字) chart, the eight stem-branch characters are not equal — one of them is the coordinate origin the other seven are read against, and that one is the Day Master (日主, rizhu). What Is Bazi located it as the stem of the day pillar; this article goes one layer down: how the Day Master is fixed, and how the question every reader meets once the pillars are laid out — strong, or weak? — is actually answered. In three moves: fix the day stem, read its strength, then read the ten gods against that strength.
Bazi (八字, “eight characters”), also called the Four Pillars of Destiny, is the Chinese art of reading a person’s life pattern from the calendar markers at the moment of their birth. It takes the year, month, day, and hour of birth, renders each as a pair of one tiangan (天干, “heavenly stem”) and one dizhi (地支, “earthly branch”), and reads the eight resulting characters as a single chart. The stem-branch cycle that supplies those pairs is the same one that labels years on a Chinese calendar; here it is reused for months, days, and hours too. What Bazi is, at its simplest, is three moves: lay out the four pillars, fix the Day Master, then read the ten gods.
