八字

Four Pillars, also called Zi Ping, reads a life from the four stem-and-branch pairs of the birth year, month, day and hour. It took its present shape in the Song dynasty. Earlier fate-calculation methods worked from the year pillar; Zi Ping moved the centre of gravity to the day stem, and that single change set the frame every later school has worked within.

The literature falls into three layers: systematic treatises that set out charting and pattern rules, rhymed verse and verdict collections that compress experience into memorable lines, and commentaries in which later writers test and correct their predecessors. The three were written with different aims, and reading them interchangeably makes it easy to mistake an extreme example from a verse for a general rule.

How to read this branch

Start with a systematic treatise to build the framework, then the verse collections, then the commentaries. Beginning with a verdict collection tends to leave you holding conclusions you cannot reconstruct.

Charting guides

Four Pillars Chart CalculatorAI Four Pillars reading builds on the four pillars. The Four Pillars system assigns a pair of Chinese sexagenary characters to the year, month, day and hour of birth. Eight characters in total. This page explains how those eight characters are derived, what each pillar represents, and the mistakes that most often produce a wrong chart.