Two charts, every relation between them, shown one by one. Ten gods from each day master, stem combinations, branch clashes and harmonies, punishments, trines, zodiac pairs — and no invented match percentage.
How two charts are compared
Every relationship below is a lookup against a fixed classical table, applied to the two charts you entered. Nothing is weighted, scored or averaged. The steps, in order:
Cast both charts — same engine as the main calculator: true solar time, worldwide places, and your choice of day-pillar school for each person.
Read each day master against the other — how A's day master classifies B's, and vice versa, as a ten god. This is the traditional backbone of a reading: wealth stars, officer stars, resource stars and so on, each with its conventional meaning.
Check every stem pair for combination or clash — the five combinations (甲己, 乙庚, 丙辛, 丁壬, 戊癸) and the four clashes (甲庚, 乙辛, 丙壬, 丁癸).
Check every branch pair for harmony, clash, harm, punishment or half-trine — all sixteen pairs, side by side, with the day-pillar row and column highlighted because the day branch is the spouse palace.
Add the zodiac pair and any cross-chart trines — the year branches are the folk-level compatibility check; a completed three-part trine across both charts is the strongest structural link this page can find.
Why there is no score here. Most compatibility sites print a number — 88%, 3.5 stars, “soulmate score”. Every one of those numbers is invented: no classical text assigns weights, so any score reflects the site author's marketing, not the tradition. This page does the opposite. It shows you every relation the tables actually contain and lets you read them — including the uncomfortable ones. A pair with three clashes and two harmonies is described here, not averaged into a meaningless 71%.
The worked example, in full
Person A: born 23 March 1991, 11:00, Beijing (壬辰 day master, Goat year). Person B: born 15 January 1990, 08:00, Beijing (庚辰 day master, Snake year). Here is everything the tables return:
Day masters: A (Ren Water) sees B (Geng Metal) as Indirect Resource; B sees A as Eating God. Neither reading is good or bad — they say how each person registers the other.
Stem combinations, three: A's Ren combines with B's Ding (Ren-Ding → Wood); A's Yi combines with B's Geng, twice (Yi-Geng → Metal, from B's day and hour stems).
Branch clash, one: A's year branch Wei against B's month branch Chou — the classic clash pair.
Harms, two: A's Mao (month) against B's Chen (day and hour) — the Mao-Chen harm.
Self-punishment: both day branches are Chen. Chen-Chen is one of the four self-punishments, and it lands on the spouse palace of both charts — the kind of relation a percentage score would dissolve into noise.
Cross-chart half-trine: A's Si (hour) meets B's Si and Chou — the Metal frame, two parts, held by both charts.
Zodiac: Goat and Snake — no harmony, no clash. The folk verdict would be “neutral”; the pair-level detail above is where the actual texture is.
The reference tables behind every tag
These are complete, not excerpts. If a pair of branches is not listed here, this page will not show a relation for it — that is a feature, not an omission.
Any two of a three-branch group constitute the punishment. Same-branch pairs of the four self-punishing branches count too.
Half trine 半三合
any two of 申子辰→Water · 亥卯未→Wood · 寅午戌→Fire · 巳酉丑→Metal
Contested: a trine needs all three branches; whether two make a partial frame is a school difference. Marked, never silently counted as a full trine.
One pair deserves its own sentence: 巳申 (Snake–Monkey) is simultaneously a six harmony and a punishment — the tables themselves disagree about that pair, and this page shows both tags rather than picking a winner. That is the site's whole method in miniature.
What this tool is not
It is not a verdict on a relationship. No table here knows whether two people are kind to each other. The traditional frames — spouse palace, resource stars, clashes — are a vocabulary for describing friction and support, in the same sense that “introvert” and “extrovert” describe temperament without deciding a friendship. Cross-chart interaction itself is a modern usage: classical texts rank stars within one chart, not between two. We compute the modern convention openly, enumerate everything, weigh nothing, and predict nothing. Nothing here is relationship, medical, legal or financial advice.
Questions people actually ask
How does BaZi compatibility work?
Both people's charts are cast, then every element of one is read against the other: each day master classifies the other as a ten god, every stem pair is checked for combination or clash, every branch pair for harmony, clash, harm, punishment or half-trine, and the two year branches (the zodiac animals) are compared. This page shows all of those relations raw, with the tables they come from, instead of boiling them into a score.
Why doesn't this calculator give a match percentage?
Because no classical source assigns weights, so every percentage online is invented by the site printing it. Two charts with three clashes and two harmonies would become “71% compatible” — a number that hides exactly the detail a reader needs. We enumerate; you interpret.
Do we both need exact birth times?
The day master, year, month and day pillars — twelve of the sixteen comparisons — are exact without a birth time. The hour pillar adds four more pairs, including one of the two spouse-palace positions, so a known hour genuinely sharpens the reading. If a time is unknown, leave it blank: the tool compares on the remaining pillars and never invents one.
Our day branches clash — what does that mean?
The day branch is called the spouse palace. A clash there (one of 子午, 丑未, 寅申, 卯酉, 辰戌, 巳亥) is traditionally read as friction in closest daily life — habits, rhythms, the unglamorous layer of a relationship. In this framework a clash describes contrast, not doom; the same table may also hold a harmony elsewhere, and this page shows both rather than netting them out.
What is a stem combination between two charts?
Five stem pairs — 甲己, 乙庚, 丙辛, 丁壬, 戊癸 — are classically said to combine and transform. Inside one chart, combination normally requires adjacency; between two charts there is no adjacency, so the interaction is a modern synastry convention. We show it because it is informative, and label the convention openly in the audit panel.
Can one pair be both harmonious and conflicting?
Yes, and the tables say so. Snake–Monkey (巳申) is a six harmony and a punishment at the same time; Dragon–Dragon is a self-punishment with no harmony to soften it. Classical tables genuinely disagree with themselves here, so this page prints every relation a pair holds instead of electing a winner.
Is this the same as zodiac compatibility?
No — zodiac compatibility is the folk-level subset: comparing only the two year branches (Rat vs Horse, and so on). It is one line of this analysis, not the whole. Two same-animal people can have completely different day masters and spouse palaces, and the pair-level relations this page enumerates are where the traditional reading actually lives.