What is a Saju calculator?
A Saju calculator — called manseryeok in Korean — turns your birth date and time into the Four Pillars: eight characters taken from the traditional East Asian calendar. Every year, month, day and two-hour block carries its own pair of characters, so under the same rules the same birth details always give the same chart. That chart is called your wonguk, and every Saju reading starts from it.
How to read the Four Pillars
The chart has four columns: Year, Month, Day and Hour. Each pillar has an upper character (the Heavenly Stem) and a lower one (the Earthly Branch), and each character belongs to one of five elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal or Water. The upper character of the Day pillar is your Day Master, the character that stands for you. The other characters are named by how they relate to it, and the pentagon under the chart shows how many of each element you have. Traditional charts often put the Year pillar on the far right; here the pillars run left to right, from Year to Hour.
If you don't know your birth time
Without a birth time, the Hour pillar is left blank and you see six characters instead of eight. Your Year, Month and Day pillars stay the same, and so does your Day Master. If you know roughly when you were born, choose "Roughly when" and we'll show the Hour pillars that fall inside that range. For births in Korea, the calculation accounts for daylight saving time in the years it was used. If you were born somewhere else, pick your birth city and the chart uses that city's local time.