What is saju?

What the word names

Saju names a chart. It does not name a service, a session or a prediction. The chart is four columns — year, month, day and hour — with two characters in each, so the same object is also counted as eight characters. It is fixed by one birth moment and does not change afterwards.

That is why having a saju and having one read are two separate things. The first is arithmetic run against a calendar, and it comes out the same however many times it is run. The second is what a tradition of reading does with the result. This site keeps the two apart on the screen as well: the chart is printed together with the rules that produced it, and what the tradition says about it stays labelled as what the tradition says.

What has to be known before there is one

Three things go in. The date of birth, the clock time of birth, and the time zone that clock was on at that place on that date. The screen asks for the zone directly rather than working it out from a place name, because the data that turns a place into a zone carries a licence question this build did not want to inherit.

Without a time of birth, three columns still stand and the fourth does not. The hour column is left unproduced rather than filled with midday or midnight, so a chart with no time behind it is a chart missing a quarter of its characters, and it says so on the screen. There is a second place where a column is left out: the year and month columns turn at solar terms, and within two minutes of one of those boundaries neither is produced, because independent calculations of the same boundary differ by about that much.

One more thing has to be true of the date. It has to be a solar date. A birth date remembered only as a lunar date cannot be used here yet — choosing the lunar option returns a message rather than a chart, because no conversion is guessed in its place. Anyone who knows only the lunar date needs the solar equivalent first, from somewhere other than this site for now.

The words that travel with it

A few Korean words arrive attached to saju, and each one names something smaller than the whole chart.

Ilgan, the day stem, is a single character out of the eight: the upper of the two in the day column. Much of the reading tradition treats it as the centre of a chart, which is why it turns up far more often in writing than the other seven.

Gunghap is not a property of one chart at all. It is the name for setting two charts beside each other and describing how the two sets of elements stand when they are placed together.

The animal — rat, ox, tiger and the rest — is the lower character of the year column, read by its old name. It is one character out of eight, and it is the one that every chart from the same stretch of the calendar has in common.

Manse-ryeok is not part of a chart. It is the calendar the whole thing is read against: the book the solar term times come from, and the reason the year turns in early February rather than on January 1.

What the tradition reads from it, and where the list stops

What comes out of a chart, in this tradition, is a set of categories. Dispositions and temperaments, read from the images the stems and branches have carried for a long time, and the way one chart is described when a second one is set beside it. That is the shape of the answer: categories, not measurements.

The list on this page stops at those. Nothing beyond them is named here, and the sentences stay descriptions of what the tradition says rather than statements about whoever is reading. That limit is a decision about what this site publishes, and it is the same on every page here.