How to Read a BaZi Chart
Follow a sample chart from its four stem-branch pairs to the Day Master, hidden stems, Five Elements, and luck cycles.
BaziCalculator.netFind the four pillars
The year, month, day, and hour columns each contain a Heavenly Stem on top and an Earthly Branch underneath. Read the column labels first, since some charts arrange the columns in reverse order. A chart without a known birth time shows three pillars and leaves the hour pillar blank.
In the example below, the day pillar is 庚辰. 庚 (Gēng) is the stem and 辰 (Chén) is the branch. Together they form one of the 60 stem-branch pairs in the Chinese calendar.
- Year
- 庚午
- Month
- 辛巳
- Day
- 庚辰
- Hour
- 癸未
Day Master 庚 · Yang Metal
Use the Day Master as your reference
The Day Master is the Heavenly Stem in the day column. In this example it is 庚, or Yang Metal. Ten Gods labels describe the relationship between that stem and the other stems. For instance, the month stem 辛 is Yin Metal, so the chart shows it as Rob Wealth (劫财), the traditional term for a same-element stem with opposite polarity.
Earthly Branches also contain hidden stems. The day branch 辰 contains 戊, 乙, and 癸. Expanding the hidden stems shows which Ten Gods relationships are present within a branch as well as in the visible stems.
Compare the two Five Elements views
The visible view counts each of the eight displayed characters once. In the example it gives three Metal, two Fire, two Earth, and one Water. The weighted view starts with those counts and adds hidden stems at weights of 1, 0.5, and 0.3 by rank. It brings out Wood in this chart through the hidden 乙 in 辰 and 未.
The bars are a count under the selected method. Traditional readings also consider the month branch and the relationships among the pillars when discussing the strength of the Day Master.
Read the timeline and calculation details
The Da Yun table lists ten-year cycles, their start years, and the date the first cycle begins. The current annual pillar appears separately. With an unknown birth time the calculator still shows the annual pillar and leaves the exact Da Yun start date unavailable.
Open the calculation details to check the birthplace time zone, standard time, and true solar time if you enabled it. If a birth falls close to a day or solar-term boundary, those details help explain why two calculators can give different pillars.