How to Read a Saju Chart: A Beginner's Step-by-Step Guide
You have your chart: four columns, eight characters and a row of colored bars. Now what? This guide takes one real chart from start to finish in the order most readers use: the Day Master, the element balance, the Ten Gods, the branches, and the luck pillars that carry the chart through time. Each step builds on the last, so resist jumping straight to next year's forecast.
The example chart
Our example is a woman born in Seoul at 8:30 p.m. on February 19, 1991, cast with Sajucheop's engine.
| Year | Month | Day | Hour | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stem | 辛 Xin · Yin Metal | 庚 Geng · Yang Metal | 庚 Geng · Yang Metal | 丙 Bing · Yang Fire |
| Stem's Ten God | Rob Wealth | Friend | Day Master | Seven Killings |
| Branch | 未 Goat · Earth | 寅 Tiger · Wood | 申 Monkey · Metal | 戌 Dog · Earth |
| Branch's Ten God | Direct Resource | Indirect Wealth | Friend | Indirect Resource |
| Hidden stems | 丁 乙 己 | 戊 丙 甲 | 戊 壬 庚 | 辛 丁 戊 |
First, check the edges. February 19 is well past Ipchun, which fell on February 4, 1991, and past that year's Lunar New Year on February 15, so every system agrees on a Xin Wei (辛未), Metal Goat, year. The Tiger month runs from Ipchun to the Awakening of Insects (Gyeongchip, 경칩, 驚蟄) on March 6. And 8:30 p.m. on a Seoul clock is about 7:58 p.m. by the sun, inside the Dog hour (7 to 9 p.m.) with or without the correction. No boundary is close, so the chart is safe to read.
Step 1: Start with the Day Master
The Day Master (ilgan, 일간, 日干) is the stem of the day pillar, and it stands for the person. Here it is 庚, Yang Metal, which Sajucheop's library calls the Raw Blade: decisive, loyal, principled, at its best on hard calls. Every other character takes its meaning from its relationship to this one, so read the Yang Metal profile first and keep it as your lens.
Then look at what the Day Master sits on. The day branch is 申, the Monkey, which is Metal too: a Day Master on its own element is well rooted. The day branch is also the spouse seat, the place read for close partnership, and the pair has its own page among the sixty: Geng Shen.
Step 2: Count the elements, then weigh them
Count the five elements among the eight visible characters: Metal 4 (辛, 庚, 庚, 申), Earth 2 (未, 戌), Wood 1 (寅), Fire 1 (丙), Water 0.
A raw count is only a start, because positions do not weigh the same. The month branch is the season of birth and counts most. She was born in the Tiger month of early spring, when Wood is in command and Metal is out of season, so on that alone a Metal Day Master would lean weak.
The rest of the chart pushes back. To judge the strength of the Day Master (singang and sinyak, 신강·신약, 身強·身弱), sort the other seven characters into those that support Metal (Metal itself, and Earth, which generates Metal) and those that drain or control it (Water, Wood and Fire). Sajucheop weighs the month branch 2, the day branch 1.5 and every other position 1:
| Character | Element | Weight | Effect on Yang Metal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 辛 year stem | Metal | 1 | Supports |
| 未 year branch | Earth | 1 | Supports |
| 庚 month stem | Metal | 1 | Supports |
| 寅 month branch | Wood | 2 | Drains |
| 申 day branch | Metal | 1.5 | Supports |
| 丙 hour stem | Fire | 1 | Controls |
| 戌 hour branch | Earth | 1 | Supports |
That puts 5.5 of 8.5, about 65 percent, on the Day Master's side. Sajucheop calls a Day Master strong at 55 percent or more and weak (the English chart says "gentle") at 35 percent or less, so this Raw Blade is strong: out of season but surrounded by allies. Other schools weigh positions differently; the Day Master strength guide compares them.
Strong does not mean better. A strong Day Master carries its own engine and does best with somewhere to spend it: work and money (Wealth), rules and pressure (Officer), outlets for expression (Output). A weak one does best with backing: learning, credentials, allies. They are two different instruction manuals.
Step 3: Read the Ten Gods as a pattern
The Ten Gods (sipseong, 십성, 十星) name each character's role relative to the Day Master. For a branch, the role comes from its main hidden stem, the last one listed in the table. Grouped into five families, this chart shows:
- Companions, 3: Friend in the month stem and day branch, Rob Wealth in the year stem. Peers, independence, competition.
- Resource, 2: Direct Resource in the year branch, Indirect Resource in the hour branch. Backing, learning, a safety net.
- Wealth, 1: Indirect Wealth in the month branch. Opportunity, ventures, money in motion.
- Officer, 1: Seven Killings in the hour stem. Pressure, challenge, the forge.
- Output, 0 visible: no Eating God or Hurting Officer on the surface.
Read the families as a pattern. The self and its allies dominate, which fits the strength verdict: someone who would rather do it herself. The only Wealth sits in the month branch, the seat of career and surroundings, with three companions nearby to compete for it, a classic picture of opportunity that has to be defended. The lone Seven Killings in the hour stem is the fire that tempers the blade: pressure she may not enjoy but tends to grow from.
The empty Output family is where hidden stems earn their keep. Inside the day branch 申 sits 壬, Yang Water, which is Eating God to Yang Metal. Expression and craft are not absent; they are tucked into the most private branch of the chart. The Ten Gods guide covers each role, and the hidden stems guide the full table.
Step 4: Look for combinations and clashes
Branches interact in three main ways: six-harmony pairs (yukhap, 육합, 六合), which bind quietly; trines (samhap, 삼합, 三合), in which three branches pull toward one element, with any two making a half trine; and clashes (chung, 충, 沖) between branches on opposite sides of the circle. Stems have combinations and clashes of their own.
- 寅 and 申 clash (month and day). Tiger faces Monkey, Wood against Metal. A clash between the month branch (work, family of origin, surroundings) and the day branch (self and partnership) is often read as movement: more changes of job, home or priorities than average, and a tug between work and private life. It also shakes the chart's only Wealth.
- 寅 and 戌 make a half Fire trine (month and hour). They are two of the three members of 寅午戌. Fire controls Metal, so this quietly feeds the Seven Killings, and the trine completes whenever a 午 (Horse) arrives from a luck pillar or a year.
- 丙 and 辛 combine (hour and year stems). In theory this pair transforms into Water, the element the chart lacks. Whether a combination transforms depends on the season and the rest of the chart; with no Water support here, most readers would treat it as a bond that ties both stems up rather than as new Water.
A clash is not a disaster and a combination is not a blessing; they show where a chart moves and where it sticks. Some schools also track "punishments" and "harms" (未 and 戌 belong to one punishment group). This walkthrough stays with combinations and clashes, which are also what Sajucheop's tools use.
Step 5: Move the chart through time
The eight characters never change. What changes is the weather passing over them: ten-year luck pillars (daeun, 대운, 大運), each year's pillar (seun, 세운, 歲運) and, at finer grain, each month and day. Luck pillars are the only part of the chart that depends on sex. They step through the sixty-pair cycle from the month pillar, forward for a man born in a yang year or a woman born in a yin year, backward otherwise. She was born in a Xin (yin) year, so her luck runs forward from 庚寅.
The starting age comes from the solar terms: count the days from birth to the next month boundary (or back to the previous one, if the luck runs backward) and divide by three. Gyeongchip came about 14.6 days after her birth, and 14.6 ÷ 3 ≈ 4.9, so her first luck pillar begins at about 5.
| Ages | Luck pillar | Stem's Ten God | What it brings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5–14 | 辛卯 Xin Mao | Rob Wealth | More Metal above, Wood below |
| 15–24 | 壬辰 Ren Chen | Eating God | The missing Water arrives |
| 25–34 | 癸巳 Gui Si | Hurting Officer | Water above, Fire below |
| 35–44 | 甲午 Jia Wu | Indirect Wealth | 午 completes the Fire trine |
| 45–54 | 乙未 Yi Wei | Direct Wealth | Wood above, Earth below |
| 55–64 | 丙申 Bing Shen | Seven Killings | Fire above, a second Monkey below |
Read luck pillars against the strength verdict. A strong Day Master generally welcomes Output, Wealth and Officer periods, which give its energy somewhere to go. That makes the Water decades from 15 to 34 a natural time to build skills and a voice, since they supply the element she was born without. The 甲午 decade is the most dramatic: Wealth above, and a Horse below that joins her Tiger and Dog in a full Fire trine, the element that forges Metal. Read it as a decade of larger responsibility, visibility and pressure, the kind a strong Metal chart is built to carry. Years work the same way on a smaller scale: 2026, a 丙午 year, brings that same Horse under a Seven Killings stem.
Treat starting ages as approximate. Sajucheop's Korean result page counts them in traditional Korean age, in which you are one at birth, so a changeover is better read as a shift across a year or two than as a birthday event. The luck pillars guide goes deeper.
Common beginner mistakes
- Reading one character alone. "I have Seven Killings, so life will be hard" skips every step above. The same character reads differently in a strong chart and a weak one.
- Treating a zero as a hole. Check hidden stems and luck pillars first. Here the "missing" Water is hidden in the day branch and delivered by two decades.
- Skipping the boundary check. A chart cast on the wrong side of a solar term or a Rat-hour midnight is a different chart.
- Centering the zodiac animal. Her animal is the Goat, and this reading barely mentioned it. The day pillar carries the self.
- Forgetting it is a mirror. A chart describes tendencies and seasons. Test it against the life in front of you and keep what is useful.
Now try it on your own chart. Cast it on Sajucheop to get your pillars, element bars, strength line and Ten Gods on one screen, read your Day Master in the library, and find your day pair among the 60 Day Pillars. To see how each day's pillar meets your chart, open today's reading.
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