Saju means “four pillars”
The word Saju (사주, 四柱) literally means “four pillars.” Those four pillars are the year, month, day and hour of your birth. Each pillar is written with two characters — a Heavenly Stem and an Earthly Branch — so four pillars give eight characters in total, called palja (팔자). That’s why Saju is also known as the Four Pillars of Destiny.
The five elements
Every character in your Saju maps to one of the five elements: Wood grows and expands, Fire shines and spreads, Earth stabilizes, Metal refines, and Water flows and adapts. How these five balance — which are strong, which are missing — is the core of a reading. Too much of one or a gap in another shapes your personality, your relationships, and the timing of your life.
Your Day Master — the “you” of your chart
The single most important character is your Day Master — the Heavenly Stem of your birth day. It represents you, and there are ten types (Yang or Yin of each element), like Yang Wood, the great tree or Yin Water, the rain. Every Saju reading starts from your Day Master and asks which elements support it and which drain it.
Saju vs. Western astrology vs. Bazi
Western astrology reads the sky — where the planets sat among the zodiac when you were born. Saju reads the calendar — your birth date in the Stem-Branch system — and weighs the five elements. Bazi is the Chinese form of the same Four-Pillars tradition; Saju is its Korean lineage. Curious how they compare? See our Saju vs. astrology guide.