A guide
Saju and BaZi: the same four pillars
사주팔자 · 四柱八字 · Sìzhù Bāzì
Purple Star editorial · Reviewed
Saju (사주) is the Korean name and practice of the Four Pillars of Destiny — the same eight characters that BaZi八字 'Eight Characters', also called Four Pillars — and in Korea, Saju (사주) — your birth year, month, day and hour each written as two characters, revealing your elemental makeup. (八字) writes in Chinese. Year, month, day and hour, each a pair of characters, from one shared calendar. One birth moment gives one chart under either name; what differs is the reading tradition around it, not the arithmetic.
What the words mean
Saju (사주, 四柱) is “four pillars”; palja(팔자, 八字) is “eight characters”. Together, saju palja is exactly the Chinese sizhu bazi — the four pillars of eight characters. Korean writes the terms in hangul and Chinese in hanzi, and the underlying characters are the same. When someone in Seoul asks for your saju and someone in Guangzhou asks for your bazi, they are asking for the same eight characters.
Same calendar, same characters
Both systems take a birth moment and write it in the sexagenary cycle — ten Heavenly Stems crossed with twelve Earthly Branches — once for the year, once for the month, once for the day and once for the hour. The stems and branches are fixed by the calendar, so a Korean saju calculator and a Chinese bazi calculator, given the same moment and the same time-zone treatment, print identical characters. There is no Korean stem or Chinese branch; there is one cycle.
The thirty-minute question
Korean practice commonly subtracts about thirty minutes from the clock time before casting. That is not a Korean quirk of the system — it is the true solar time correction. Korea runs on UTC+9, the meridian of 135°E, while Seoul sits at about 127°E: the sun there runs some thirty minutes behind the clock. We apply the same correction, from your birthplace’s actual longitude, to every chart with a known hour and place; for Seoul it comes to about −32 minutes. How that works, and what we do not correct, is set out in how we compute your chart.
Where readings differ
The pillars are identical; the interpretation grew up in different rooms. Korean saju reading has its own emphases, vocabulary and popular forms, and Chinese bazi reading has several schools of its own. The differences are real, but they are differences of interpretation, not of the chart, and this page makes no claim to teach either tradition.
Check the arithmetic
Because we compute the pillars rather than describe them, the equivalence is something you can test. Cast a chart here, open the BaZi section, and set the four pillars beside any saju reading you already have. If the birth time and place were treated the same way, the eight characters will match. If they do not, the thirty minutes above is almost always the reason.
What we do not do
We do not offer readings in Korean, and we do not cover 토정비결 (Tojeong Bigyeol), the Korean new-year almanac reading, which is a different system. What we offer is the shared foundation — the eight characters, computed carefully and explained in English — and a Zi Wei Dou Shu紫微斗数 'Purple Star Astrology' — a 1,000-year-old Chinese system that maps your destiny across 12 life palaces based on your exact birth moment. chart beside it.
Cast your chart free and read your four pillars — the same eight characters, whichever name you learned them by.
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