Coming from BaZi? How This Method Maps Across

The foundation is identical. Both methods read the sexagenary stem-branch calendar — the same ten heavenly stems, the same twelve earthly branches, the same sixty-term cycle. A chart built here uses the same calendar data a BaZi chart would.

Your Day Master is your Day Master. It is the heavenly stem of the day pillar, it represents you, and everything else in the chart is read in relation to it. Nothing about that changes.

Hidden stems inside the earthly branches work the same way, and so does the generating and controlling logic between the five elements. If you can already tell which element supports your Day Master and which drains it, that reading transfers directly.

This is the part that surprises most BaZi readers: the Ten Gods and this method's Ten Major Stars are the same ten stem-relationships, in the same order. Only the naming convention differs. BaZi names them by social role — officer, wealth, resource. This method names them as stars.

Once you have the mapping, any Ten Gods knowledge you already carry can be applied to a chart here without relearning the logic. The relationship between your Day Master and each other stem is calculated identically.

Two BaZi names vary between schools, so both are given below where that applies: 比肩 appears as Friend or Companion, and 七殺 / 偏官 appears as Seven Killings or Indirect Officer.

What BaZi calls void branches — kong wang, the two branches left without a stem in a given ten-term run — is what this method calls Tenchusatsu. The calculation is the same: find the run your day pillar belongs to, and the two branches that run could not reach are yours.

The naming has a history worth knowing. Tenchusatsu is a twentieth-century Japanese coinage for the older concept of 空亡. If you have read about kong wang, you have read about Tenchusatsu.

Luck pillars carry over too. The ten-year cycles you know as luck pillars are read here as 大運, and the yearly layer as annual fortune. The mechanics of stepping through the branches are the same.

Here is the real structural divergence. BaZi means "eight characters": four pillars — year, month, day, and hour — each contributing a stem and a branch. This Japanese method reads three pillars: year, month, and day. Six characters, not eight.

The reasoning given for this within the Japanese tradition runs on two tracks. The first is structural: the three retained units each follow an observable celestial motion — a day is the earth's rotation, a month the moon's cycle, a year the earth's orbit. An hour is a human convention for subdividing a day; on this account it does not correspond to a movement in nature, so it falls outside the frame the system is built on.

The second is practical, and it has not gone away with time. Through most of the centuries these systems were forming, birth times were not recorded at all — ordinary people did not know their own hour. A method that requires it can only ever serve the minority who do.

That limitation is still with us, in ways worth noticing. Public figures almost never publish their birth time. A friend's birthday you probably know; their hour of birth you would have to ask for directly — and more often than not they do not know it either, which makes it an awkward thing to ask for. Working from year, month, and day means you can cast a chart for a historical figure, a public figure, a grandparent who has passed, or simply someone you would rather not interrogate. The hour is not a missing column here; it is a unit the method never claimed, and not claiming it is what makes the method usable on people who are not sitting in front of you.

You should weigh that argument for yourself. It comes from teaching schools and practitioners rather than from any central authority, and BaZi practice plainly disagrees — the hour pillar is read there as carrying real information about later life, children, and fine-grained timing. What can be said without dispute is that a three-pillar chart here is not a four-pillar chart with one column hidden: the techniques layered on top of it were built for three, and nothing in the reading is left waiting for a fourth.

Beyond the shared foundation, this method carries techniques that developed in Japan and that a BaZi reader will not have encountered under these names.

The chart is drawn as a human-body diagram rather than a grid of four columns. Stars are placed at the centre, head, chest, and both hands, and the position of a star changes how it is read — the same star in a different position carries a different emphasis.

Alongside the Ten Major Stars sit the Twelve Supporting Stars, which measure how much energy runs through early, middle, and later life. And a set of numerical techniques — energy values totalled across the stems, then distributed across five areas — reads the balance of a chart quantitatively rather than by star names alone.

Whether these additions are useful is for you to judge. The point of this page is only that they sit on a foundation you already know.

The fastest way to check any of this is to run a birth date you have already read in BaZi and compare. Your Day Master should match. The Ten Gods should line up with the Ten Major Stars via the table above. Your void branches should be the Tenchusatsu group the chart reports.

Where you will see something new is the human-body layout, the supporting stars, and the numerical balance. That is the part worth judging on its own terms.