Basics · four pillars, four palaces
Four pillars is not a poetic name for four columns of data. Each one is a palace: the surroundings you were born into, the surroundings you work in, yourself, and what comes later. The value of the layout is that three of the four pillars carry a ten god and the fourth does not, and that asymmetry is what makes a chart readable.
The output gives each pillar with its ten god (the day pillar is marked as the self) and its nayin, then opens the day-pillar profile separately.
Still the 1985-07-04 12:00 male example.
| Pillar | Palace | Pillar | Nayin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year pillar | ancestry and early environment | 乙丑 Yi Chou | 海中金 Gold in the Sea |
| Month pillar | parents, upbringing, career environment | 壬午 Ren Wu | 杨柳木 Willow Wood |
| Day pillar | the self and the spouse palace | 甲辰 Jia Chen | 覆灯火 Lamp Flame Fire |
| Hour pillar | children and later life | 庚午 Geng Wu | 路旁土 Roadside Earth |
A ten god is a name for a relation to the day master, and the day stem is the reference point itself, so it cannot stand in relation to itself.
| Position | Stem | What it carries |
|---|---|---|
| Year pillar | 乙 Yi | 劫财 Rival (JieCai) |
| Month pillar | 壬 Ren | 偏印 Indirect Resource (PianYin) |
| Day pillar | 甲 Jia | the day master itself, no ten god |
| Hour pillar | 庚 Geng | 七杀 Seven Killings (QiSha) |
So the four pillars actually yield three positions for a stem god: the year stem, the month stem and the hour stem. This site turns those three positions against ten gods into 30 separate pages, each with a computed example and the classical reading, rather than folding them into one 3 by 10 table.
The day pillar is not read from its stem alone; the relation between stem and branch is part of it.
| Field | Value for the example chart |
|---|---|
| Day pillar | 甲辰 Jia Chen |
| Stem against branch | 盖头 Stem controls branch (gai tou) |
| Twelve stages | 衰 / Decline |
| Branch animal | Dragon |
| Hidden stems inside | 3 |
| Nayin | 覆灯火 Lamp Flame Fire |
There are five kinds of stem-to-branch relation, and every day-pillar page on this site prints this field first:
| Kind | Reading |
|---|---|
same | Same element (bi he) |
support | Branch generates stem (de di) |
drain | Stem generates branch (xie) |
control | Stem controls branch (gai tou) |
undercut | Branch controls stem (jie jiao) |
These are the questions specific to this page; broader conventions live on the methodology page.
Every enumerable component of ba zi has its own page here. Each page is computed by the same engine and can be checked item by item — none of it is a personality table.