Start with the shape of the table
A Saju chart is a table of four pillars side by side. A traditional chart puts the year pillar on the far right, but SajuPath lists them in the order year, month, day, hour from the left, which is easier to follow for most readers. Each pillar has two cells: the top one is a Heavenly Stem and the bottom one an Earthly Branch. When your birth time is known, all eight cells are filled.
Step one: find your Day Master
Look at the top character of the day pillar. This is your Day Master, the reference point for the whole chart. The other seven characters are read by how they relate to it. SajuPath describes the ten possible Day Masters as natural images, such as the Great Tree, the Candle or the Great River, so that the character becomes easy to picture.
Step two: count the Five Elements
Every character carries one of the Five Elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal or Water. Go through the eight cells and count how many of each you have. A chart can be crowded in one element or have none of another, and both patterns say something about how that person tends to be. The pentagon drawn under the table shows the counts at a glance.
- Many of one element means that kind of energy is used often.
- None of an element is a place worth giving a little extra attention.
Step three: look at the month and the cycles
The bottom character of the month pillar, the month branch, tells you which season's energy your birth month carries, so it weighs a lot in a reading. After that, check at what age your Dae-un cycle starts. It is shown once you choose a gender, because the direction of the cycle depends on it. From there you can follow how the energy around you shifts every ten years.
If you do not know your birth time
When the hour is unknown, the hour pillar is left blank and you read six characters instead of eight. The steps above stay exactly the same, and the Day Master does not change, because it comes from the day pillar. Choosing "around this time of day" instead shows which hour pillars are possible for that window.
Common misunderstandings
The Chinese characters in the table can look intimidating, but you do not need to memorise them. Following the name of the element attached to each cell is enough to read the chart. Nor is a chart good because one element is plentiful, or bad because one is scarce. How many of each there are is not a ranking; it is a clue to the way that person tends to put their energy to use. Entering a lunisolar date as a solar date, or the other way round, gives different characters, so check the calendar type first when you type in your birthday.
Going a little deeper
Once the three steps feel familiar, you can also look at how the characters relate to each other: combinations, where characters join and blend, and clashes, where they push against each other. At first, though, the three steps above are plenty to get the big picture of your own chart.