The Eight Characters: What Saju Is Before Anyone Reads It

Come in. Mind the books by the door — I have been meaning to shelve them since spring and have not. Take the chair by the window; it gets the last of the afternoon, and it is the warm one. The tea is poured already, so there is no hurry in this. Today I want to explain one thing only, and slowly: what saju actually is. Eight characters. That is the whole of the object, and before your cup is cool you will know where every one of the eight came from.

Most people who sit in that chair arrive with the word already in their ears and no idea what is underneath it. They have heard that saju tells you your fate. It does not, and I will come to why. What it is, plainly, is a record of the moment you were born, written out in the notation of an old calendar: four columns of two characters each. Nothing hidden and nothing withheld. Anyone can be taught the frame of it in an afternoon, and in forty years I have not met one who could not.

Four pillars, eight characters: what the words mean

The Korean word saju is two characters meaning four pillars. Palja is two characters meaning eight characters. Put the two together, sajupalja, and you have the whole description of the thing: four pillars, eight characters. English books usually call this the four pillars of destiny. The Chinese tradition that shares the same method calls it BaZi, which is their pronunciation of those same two characters, eight characters. Same eight, same calendar, different rooms of one house. Where Korean and Chinese readers part company, they part on emphasis and lineage, not on the arithmetic.

I will note in passing that palja long ago drifted loose from the charts and became the ordinary Korean word for a person's lot in life. When someone says their palja is good, this is what they are quoting without knowing it. I raise it once and then leave it, because the everyday word carries a resignation the eight characters themselves do not.

The four pillars are the year of your birth, the month, the day, and the hour. Four measures of different sizes, nested inside one another. Each is called a pillar because the old books thought of a chart the way a builder thinks of a frame — you raise the four uprights first, and only afterward ask what sort of house they will carry.

Now the eight. On each pillar sits a pair of characters, one above the other. The upper is called a heavenly stem, the lower an earthly branch. Four pillars, two characters apiece, and there are your eight. That is the entire structure. Take only that away today and you have taken the thing itself.

Old readers gave the four pillars four positions in a life, and I still find the scale useful. The year pillar they called the root: what you came out of, the household and the early years. The month pillar was the sprout, the years of leaving the parents' house and meeting the world, and it carries the season you were born into, which weighs more than a beginner expects. The day pillar was the flower: you yourself, and whoever stands nearest you. The hour pillar was the fruit, what you extend into, the later years and what you make. Root, sprout, flower, fruit. I would not have you take these for four boxes with a person divided among them. They are a way of laying a life out lengthwise so that you can look along it.

The ten heavenly stems and the twelve earthly branches

The upper characters are drawn from a set of ten: gap, eul, byeong, jeong, mu, gi, gyeong, sin, im, gye. These are the heavenly stems. Chinese readers say the same ten as jia, yi, bing, ding, wu, ji, geng, xin, ren, gui.

The lower characters are drawn from a set of twelve: ja, chuk, in, myo, jin, sa, o, mi, sin, yu, sul, hae. These are the earthly branches, and you know them already, though perhaps not by these names. The twelve animals, rat and ox and tiger and rabbit and the rest, are the earthly branches under their popular names. A person born in a rat year was born in a ja year. That is all a zodiac sign is: the branch of the year pillar, one character out of eight, raised by folk custom to stand for the whole.

I would set a marker here, because this is where people most often go astray. The animal of your birth year is not the most telling of the eight. When somebody accounts for your whole nature on the strength of it, they are reading an eighth of the page and calling it the book. That is a common thing to believe. I believed it myself as a boy, until my grandfather set a brush in my hand and made me copy out the other seven.

Every one of these twenty-two characters carries two further properties. It belongs to one of five elements, which are wood, fire, earth, metal and water, and it is either yin or yang. Those five are the material the eight characters are made of, and how they feed and press one another is the whole subject of our next sitting. It will not fit in today's cup. For now, hold this much: ten characters from above, twelve from below, one of each on every pillar.

And they are not read apart. Within a pillar the stem and the branch are one thing rather than two. The stem is the part that shows, the temperament a person leads with, the face turned outward. The branch is the ground that temperament is rooted in, and it carries the season, the stretch of the year the character belongs to. So we do not read gap and ja; we read gapja, the pair, and ask how the upper is sitting on the lower. A stem well rooted in its branch behaves differently from the same stem standing on ground that will not hold it. This is why a chart is weighed pillar against pillar, and upper against lower, instead of being tallied character by character.

Sixty pairs, and what casting a chart really is

Pair the ten stems against the twelve branches in order and you do not get a hundred and twenty combinations. You get sixty, because the two wheels turn together and come back into step only at sixty. Gapja, eulchuk, byeongin, and onward until gapja comes up again. Koreans call the run the sixty gapja; in English it is usually the sexagenary cycle. The old calendar counted years, months, days and hours with it, over and over, without ever needing a number.

Sixty years to one turn. Which is why, when a person has lived sixty full years, the same pair returns to the year pillar and the family holds a hwangap, the sixtieth-birthday feast, the return of the gapja. The custom is older than most of the people who keep it realise.

I learned the sixty by heart before I learned much else, and I mention it only so I can tell you the next part: you do not need to. Casting a chart is not a gift and it is not a trance. It is bookkeeping. Someone takes the year, month, day and hour of your birth and writes each down in the sixty-pair notation, the way a clerk converts one currency into another. A perpetual calendar does the converting — the manseryeok, and now any competent piece of software. Whatever difficulty there is in saju is not in getting the eight characters. It is entirely in the reading of them.

Where the year turns, and where the hour turns

There are two places the bookkeeping catches beginners out, and knowing them beforehand will save you an argument.

The first: the saju year does not begin on the first of January, and it does not begin at Lunar New Year either, which surprises people who assume this must be a lunar system. It begins at ipchun, the solar term that opens spring, in the first days of February. The pillars follow the stations of the sun, not the phases of the moon. So if you were born in January, or in the first few days of February, you may be carrying the previous year's characters, and you would do well to check rather than assume. The months behave the same way. A saju month starts not on the first of the calendar month but on the day a solar term enters — the myo month, for instance, opens at gyeongchip, when the old books say the insects wake, and not one day before.

The second: the day is divided into twelve, not twenty-four. Each branch takes two hours of it. The ja hour runs from roughly eleven at night to roughly one in the morning, and it opens the day rather than closing it, so anyone born near midnight is sitting on a seam. There is a further wrinkle in Korea, whose standard clock sits somewhat ahead of the country's own longitude, so clock time and sun time do not quite agree. If your birth hour falls near the edge of a two-hour block, it is worth having the place of birth taken into account and not only the time.

Some people do not know their hour at all. It happens more often than you would think, and it is no calamity. We then work with six characters and leave the hour pillar standing empty, a corner of the map folded over. The larger country is still perfectly legible; the ridges and the rivers do not move. If the hour turns up later, out of a family record or an old paper, you unfold the corner then. There is nothing in an unfinished map to be afraid of.

The day master: the one character to find first

Of the eight, one is you. Not the year animal, as almost everyone assumes, but the upper character of the day pillar. We call it the day master, and it is the point on the map marked here is where you are standing. The other seven are not rivals to it. They are the country around it: some of that country easy going, some of it steep, some of it asking more than is comfortable.

I raise it today only so that you know where to look; we will give it a whole sitting later on. But if you go and find your eight characters this week, find the day master among them first, and the arrangement will stop being a row of symbols and start being a place with a road through it.

A map of tendencies, and not a prophecy

Now the part that matters more than any of the machinery.

The commonest thing I am asked, usually inside ten minutes of somebody taking that chair, is whether the eight characters have a life written out in them in advance. They do not. I have spent forty years with these characters and I will say it plainly: eight characters will not hold a whole person. The lay of the ground shows, though — which way a temperament naturally runs, what has tended to come cheaply, what has always cost this person more than it appears to cost others. The lay of the ground is enough to work with.

Consider two people born in the same hour of the same day. Identical eight characters, down to the last stroke. They do not live the same life, and no honest reader has claimed they would. Different ground underfoot, different households, different people beside them, and then the choices, made one at a time across decades, which belong to them alone. The same map handed to two travellers has never yet produced the same journey.

So I would have you hold your eight characters the way a painter holds an underdrawing: the sketch beneath the paint, showing where the shapes were first set down. The colour is still yours to lay in. What the drawing is good for is not guessing what comes next. It is knowing what to have ready, and roughly when. If the water is rising, you set out more vessels. If it is a dry stretch, you take more care with what you are holding. There is no verdict anywhere in that. It is preparation, which is the opposite of a verdict, because preparation assumes you are going to act.

This is the halving the whole craft rests on. A chart is the vessel; fortune is the water that comes into it, season by season. The eight characters describe the shape of your bowl, and that shape is yours from birth. What the years pour in arrives and leaves on its own schedule and is read by a separate method: the ten-year tides, which we call daeun. I will set that out at the end of this series. Today I wanted only to put the name on the table.

Three rules hang over the door of this study, and I will give them to you now so that you can hold me to them for the next four sittings. I do not sell fear. I hand over a map and never a prophecy. And the last step is always yours.

We will stop here. That is enough for one cup, and the light has gone off the window besides. If you would like something to carry out with you: go and find your eight characters, which any perpetual calendar will set out for you, and locate the upper character of the day pillar. Do not look up what it means. Sit with it a while and let it stay unfamiliar. Next time we take up the five elements, and the eight characters will begin to read as a sentence rather than a list. Whether that sentence tells you anything true is yours to judge. That part was never mine.