Before you begin: how a BaZi year works

Ask most people when the year begins and they say 1 January. Ask someone who lives by the Chinese lunisolar calendar and they say Chinese New Year, which in 2027 falls on 6 February. Ask a BaZi practitioner and they reach for a table of solar terms and look for a single instant in early February, the moment the Sun reaches 315 degrees of ecliptic longitude. That instant is called 立春 (Lì Chūn), "the establishment of spring", and in 2027 it arrives on 4 February at 09:46 Beijing time. Before it, you are still in the previous year. After it, you are in 丁未.

This first chapter gives you just enough of the machinery to read the rest of the book comfortably. If you already know how a chart is built, skim it and move on.

The four pillars in one page

A BaZi chart has four columns, called pillars, built from the moment of birth: the Year pillar, the Month pillar, the Day pillar and the Hour pillar. Each pillar has two characters. The top one is a Heavenly Stem (天干, tiān gān) and the bottom one is an Earthly Branch (地支, dì zhī). Four pillars, two characters each, eight characters in all, which is what "BaZi" (八字) literally means.

There are ten stems, in five pairs of Yang and Yin, one pair for each of the five elements:

The classical images help. 甲 is a tall tree, 乙 a vine or a flower. 丙 is the sun, 丁 a candle or a lamp. 戊 is a mountain, 己 a field. 庚 is a sword or an axe, 辛 a jewel. 壬 is a river or the sea, 癸 rain, mist and dew.

There are twelve branches, the familiar animals of the Chinese zodiac: Rat 子, Ox 丑, Tiger 寅, Rabbit 卯, Dragon 辰, Snake 巳, Horse 午, Goat 未, Monkey 申, Rooster 酉, Dog 戌 and Pig 亥. Each branch also belongs to a season and an element, and each one carries one to three hidden stems, which we meet properly in chapter 2.

The most important character in a chart is the stem of the Day pillar. It is called the Day Master (日主, rì zhǔ) and it stands for you, the person the chart belongs to. Everything else in the chart is read in relation to it. If you were born on a day whose stem is 己, you are a Yin Earth Day Master, and the whole chart is a description of what surrounds a field.

Why the year changes in early February

BaZi measures time by the Sun. The solar year is cut into twenty-four terms, about two weeks apart. Twelve of them, called the "node" terms (節, jié), mark the start of a new month. The other twelve, the "middle" terms, fall in the middle of each month and do not change the pillar.

The first node term of the year is 立春, which opens the Tiger month (寅). That is why the BaZi year, and every month inside it, is aligned to the Sun and not to the Moon or to the Gregorian calendar. Someone born on 2 February 2027 belongs to the Horse year 丙午 and to the last month of winter, the Ox month 丑. Someone born on 5 February 2027 belongs to the Goat year 丁未 and to the first month, the Tiger month 壬寅.

There is a practical lesson here. A very common mistake in do-it-yourself charts is to take the year from the Chinese New Year date and the month from the Gregorian date. If you have only ever read horoscopes by zodiac animal, check yours at bazi.cards, because anyone born in January or the first days of February may find that their animal is not the one they thought.

One distinction is worth fixing early. The year pillar 丁未 belongs to the calendar, and everybody lives in it. The year pillar of your chart belongs to your birth, and it may be any of the sixty pillars. In this book the first is called the year, and the second is called your Year pillar, with a capital letter. When we say that the Goat meets your Year pillar, we mean that the animal of 2027 meets the animal of your birth year, and nothing more mysterious than that.

Stems, branches and the five elements

The five elements are not substances. They are phases of a cycle, and BaZi reads two relations between them.

In the generating cycle, Wood feeds Fire, Fire makes Earth (ash), Earth bears Metal, Metal gathers Water (a common picture is dew forming on cold metal), and Water nourishes Wood.

In the controlling cycle, Wood pierces Earth with its roots, Earth dams Water, Water puts out Fire, Fire melts Metal, and Metal cuts Wood.

Each element is a gift and a cost at the same time. Fire warms a house and burns it. Water carries a boat and drowns it. When the classics say an element is "too strong", they do not mean that it is bad. They mean that there is more of it than the chart can use, and that the surplus will find its way into the person's life as a habit, a pressure or a blind spot.

The Ten Gods in two paragraphs

Once you know your Day Master, every other stem in the chart, and in any year or month, can be described by its relation to you. There are five kinds of relation, and each comes in two flavours, depending on whether the other stem has the same polarity as yours or the opposite one. This gives ten names, the Ten Gods (十神, shí shén). Where a name says "direct", the other stem has the opposite polarity; where it says "indirect", the same polarity.

• Friend (比肩) and Rob Wealth (劫財): the same element as you. Peers, siblings, rivals, partners, your own strength. Friend is the same polarity, Rob Wealth the opposite.
• Eating God (食神) and Hurting Officer (傷官): the element you produce. Expression, craft, talk, creativity, appetite, rebellion. Eating God is the same polarity, Hurting Officer the opposite.
• Indirect Wealth (偏財) and Direct Wealth (正財): the element you control. Money, goods, what you handle and shape. Indirect Wealth is the same polarity, Direct Wealth the opposite.
• Seven Killings (七殺) and Direct Officer (正官): the element that controls you. Authority, structure, pressure, rules, duty. Seven Killings is the same polarity, Direct Officer the opposite.
• Indirect Resource (偏印) and Direct Resource (正印): the element that produces you. Learning, support, shelter, documents, care. Indirect Resource is the same polarity, Direct Resource the opposite.

Do not read the names as verdicts. Seven Killings sounds like a villain and it is often the star behind someone's best discipline. Direct Wealth sounds like a bank statement and it is also, in a quiet way, the habit of keeping what you have. Every god has a gift and a cost. The glossary gives a short note on each, and the Ten Gods book that the Library is preparing will go into them in full. In this book we use them as a vocabulary for saying what the year's stems are to you.

How a year meets a chart

When a year arrives, it brings two characters, a stem and a branch, and the branch brings its own hidden stems. Three things happen to your chart.

First, each of the year's stems becomes one of the Ten Gods for you. For a Yin Earth Day Master (己), the year stem 丁 is Indirect Resource, and the hidden stems of 未 are Friend, Indirect Resource and Seven Killings. That gives the year a flavour for you in particular, before any other detail is considered. Chapters 4 to 8 do this work for each of the ten Day Masters.

Second, the year's branch forms relations with the branches in your chart: a clash, a combination, a harm, a punishment, a break, or a half or full three-harmony union. These relations touch the position of the branch in question. A clash on the Day branch is felt in the home and in close partnership. A clash on the Month branch is felt at work and in the circle around it. Chapter 9 is devoted to this.

Third, the year is read against your ten-year Luck Pillar (大運, dà yùn). A year is a single wave and a Luck Pillar is the tide it rides on. The same clash that feels like a heavy workload in a supportive decade can feel like exhaustion in a draining one. This book cannot calculate your Luck Pillars, but your free chart at bazi.cards shows them, and the Luck Pillars book that the Library is preparing will explain how to read them.

Strong and weak: the one distinction you need

Many of the readings in the chapters ahead split into two versions, one for a strong Day Master and one for a weak one. The word "strong" has nothing to do with character. A Day Master is strong when it has plenty of support in the chart: it was born in a season that feeds it, it has roots in the branches, and its own element and the element that produces it are abundant. It is weak when it has little of this and a lot of drain around it, in the form of output, wealth and authority stars.

The reason it matters is simple. The same fuel is welcome in one fireplace and dangerous in another. A year that adds Fire is a gift to someone whose chart is cold and wet, and a pressure to someone whose chart is dry and hot. When we say, in the Earth chapter for instance, that 丁 brings warmth to a weak 己 and overheating to a strong one, this is what we mean.

You can get a first impression of strength by looking at your birth month. The branch of the Month pillar is the single heaviest factor, because it says which season you were born into. A Fire Day Master born in summer begins strong. A Fire Day Master born in winter begins weak. After the season, count the roots (branches that hold your own element or the one that produces it) and the stems that echo your own. The article on strong and weak Day Masters on the BaZi Cards site, and the worksheet in chapter 12, walk you through it. The strong and weak labels given to the example people in this book are first impressions of this kind, made from the season and the roots. A full reading weighs the whole chart.

What "tends to" means

Throughout the book we write sentences such as "this is the kind of month that tends to bring paperwork to the front". Read that sentence the way you would read a weather forecast for a coastal town. It tells you what the air is doing. It does not say whether you will take an umbrella, and it does not say whether you will enjoy the rain.

Three habits keep the reading honest.

Read the whole chart. One clash, one combination, one god never decides a year. A Direct Officer year can be a promotion for one person and a heavy supervisor for another, depending on what the rest of the chart does with authority.

Look for the theme, not the headline. A clash on the Day branch is a theme of home and partnership being rearranged. The rearrangement may be a move, a renovation, a long overdue conversation or a new routine. The chart does not choose which.

Keep the decision with yourself. This book may tell you that a given month tends to run hot with disagreements. It does not tell you to skip the meeting, cancel the wedding or leave the job. Practical choices should come from your circumstances, your own advisers and your own judgment, with the chart as a lens.

A small example to carry through the book

Let us meet a first fictional reader, Leonor, a 62-year-old translator from Porto. Her Day Master is 己, Yin Earth. She was born in early August, just after the Monkey month began, and her Day branch is 丑, the Ox. She was born in a Dragon year, her Hour branch is the Rabbit, and her chart has a single Water stem, in her Month pillar, and a single Fire stem, in her Hour pillar.

Before reading anything about 2027, she can already say three things from the material in this chapter. The year stem 丁 will be Indirect Resource for her, because that is how Fire relates to Earth when the polarities match. The branch 未 will clash with her Day branch 丑, so the theme of home and close partnership will be active. And because she was born in the Metal season, which draws Earth away, with only a little Fire, her Earth probably leans toward the lighter side, even though the Dragon and the Ox give it roots. As we saw above, that changes how the extra Fire is felt.

That is three useful observations from three facts, and it is how every chapter in this book works. You have a fact about your chart, you find the matching section, and you read what the classical system says that fact tends to mean. Leonor will return in chapters 6, 10 and 11, and we will see how her year unfolds as a set of themes and not as a list of events.

How the rest of the book is organised

Chapter 2 introduces the pillar of the year itself, the Yin Fire over the Goat, and what each half of it means. Chapter 3 lays out the twelve months with exact dates. Chapters 4 to 8 are the Day Master chapters. Chapter 9 looks at the relations between the Goat and the branches in your chart. Chapter 10 turns this into a personal calendar of friction and ease. Chapter 11 is about planning, and chapter 12 gives you worksheets to write in. At the back you will find a glossary.

Before turning the page, find your chart if you have not yet got it. Write down your Day Master and the four branches. You will need them in about ten minutes.