Four Pillars of Destiny

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.