Read the natal report in full

This report was generated from the eight characters of your birth moment: four pillars, each one stem over one branch. BaZi is a solar system: the year changes at Li Chun, not at Chinese New Year, and the months follow the solar terms. The reading style descends from the Ziping method - three pillars attributed to Li Xuzhong in the Tang dynasty, four to Xu Ziping in the Song.

Every step of your derivation - the historical zone offset in force on your birth date, the longitude correction, the equation of time - is printed in the derivation appendix at the end of this document. If any step disagrees with another calculator, daypillar.com/methodology explains why two honest engines can differ. Mechanical facts - which stem hides in which branch, which pairs combine or clash - are stated as facts; everything else is what the tradition reads into them, not a prediction. Where schools genuinely differ, the closing chapter, 'Conventions, limits and how to check us', says so.

The stem sitting on top of your day pillar is Yang Metal (Geng 庚). It is called your Day Master, and classical practice reads the whole chart relative to it: the other seven characters are classified by what they do to this one.

Metal is the principle of structure and refinement: edges, standards, things brought to shape. Classically it cuts away what is excess and holds a line under pressure.

Your full day pillar is 庚辰 - the 17th of the sixty stem-branch pairs the cycle runs through before repeating. Everyone born on your solar day carries these two characters; the rest of the chart is what separates you from them.

Its yang polarity is the outward-facing expression of that element: active, initiating, easier to see than to contain.

You were born in the month of the Rooster (You 酉) - the season the whole chart is read against, because the month fixes which element rules and so sets the climate every other character has to live in.

Mechanically: your month branch carries metal, and your day master is metal.

That means your day master stands in its own season - the classical condition called de ling, holding the command of the season. Charts born in-season get the benefit of the doubt on strength, all else being equal.

The season is also read through a second, older lens - the five states, which rotate every element through the year rather than tracking one stem. Your day master, Geng (庚), is metal, and in your birth season it sits at Wang: commanding the season outright - the strongest of the five states.

Under the rooster branch, metal rules. Across the five elements: wood is Si, fire is Qiu, earth is Xiu, metal is Wang and water is Xiang. Which element holds Wang is fixed by the season alone, and every other state follows from its relation to that one.

Your three other visible stems - 乙 as your DIRECT WEALTH, 乙 as your DIRECT WEALTH and 癸 as your HURTING OFFICER - take their names from the Ziping method, which gives every stem a role relative to your day master. These are standard terms consolidated in the classical compendia, and they are roles, not literal relatives. The table sets each one out.

Direct Wealth is your most repeated ten god among these stems, appearing twice.

Your seven non-day-master units at primary qi sort into the five registers as resource 3, output 1, wealth 2, officer 0 and peer 1. The registers group the ten gods by what they do: Resource (support), Output (expression), Wealth (grasp), Officer (constraint) and Peers (equals). Reading a chart by which of them are loud and which are thin is standard practice across the compendia.

Your chart weighs out as earth 3, wood 2, metal 2 and water 1. That is one unit for each visible stem plus the primary qi hidden inside each branch, which gives eight units in a chart like yours.

By this count Earth is your most present element (3 of 8 units), and Fire your least (0). What the classical texts make the spread of elements bear on is whether your day master is strong or weak, which they describe as the support it receives from the other elements in the chart. That judgement is made in the day-master chapter below, where this report states its own weighting in full. Your fire count of zero belongs to this count rather than to your chart: the wider count in the next paragraph finds one unit of it.

The count above uses each branch's primary qi only, because that is what can be checked by hand from the pillars above. Counting every hidden stem instead - branches hold up to three - gives your chart wood 4, earth 3, metal 3, water 3 and fire 1. The proportions move because your own branches hide different numbers of stems: 丑 holds three, 酉 holds one. On that count wood leads instead of earth, which is why this chapter names the count it is using.

Your branches are 丑 (Chou, the ox, earth), 酉 (You, the rooster, metal), 辰 (Chen, the dragon, earth) and 未 (Wei, the goat, earth), year to hour. Each is an animal sign, an element, and a small room holding up to three hidden stems. The chart grid on the first page prints those hidden stems with their ten-god roles. The day branch's primary qi - the stem 戊 hidden inside 辰, the dragon - counts as your INDIRECT RESOURCE relative to your day master, because the day branch is read as the intimate sphere.

Roles named above that the ten-gods table did not cover, one line each: Direct Resource (support through proper channels - education, protection, tradition); Rob Wealth (rival energy, boldness, rivalry over shared resources); Indirect Resource (support through unconventional learning, intuition, outside mentors); Direct Officer (authority in its proper form - duty, structure, legitimacy).

Your branches stand in 2 named relationships to each other:

Your 丑-未 (year x hour) is an oppositional pair. Clashes classically mark movement and sudden change between the affairs of the two palaces.

Your 酉-辰 (month x day) is a combining pair. Combinations classically bind the affairs of the two palaces together: cooperation, attachment, entanglement. Classically this pair is said to combine into metal.

Your branches come one member short of one three-branch set, and complete none. Two classical relationships work on three branches at once rather than pairwise: the four three-harmony trios, each said to combine into one element, and the four directional trios, each a season's three consecutive branches. Both need all three members to complete.

Two of three: You (酉, the Rooster) in the month pillar and Chou (丑, the Ox) in the year pillar sit toward a three-harmony trio said to combine into metal. The third member is Si (巳, the Snake), which is not in your chart, so the set does not complete.

Your stems - 乙, 乙, 癸 and 庚 - are read against each other for two named relationships of their own. Five pairs combine, each a yang stem with its yin partner, classically said to draw toward a producing element; four pairs stand in direct opposition, east against west or south against north. The two earth stems sit at the centre and take no side in either table.

乙 (year and month) and 庚 (day) form one of the five combinations, said to draw toward metal as its product. One side of this pair is your own day stem: the tradition reads being combined as binding or engaging the self directly - cooperation and entanglement in the same gesture.

Across your 4 branches your day master Geng (庚) passes through the Mu, Di Wang, Yang and Guan Dai stages of the classical twelve-stage cycle - a fixed run of birth, growth, peak, decline and rest repeating every twelve branches. Each stem starts from its own anchor branch; yours is yang, so it steps forward through the cycle.

On the weighting this report applies, your day master Geng (庚) scores 6 of 9 - the strong band. Whether a day master is strong enough to carry what the chart hands it is the classical question that decides everything downstream. The classical texts describe that strength as the support the day master receives from the other elements in the chart; how much each kind of support counts is judgement, and this report states its weighting in full so it can be disagreed with from evidence. The mechanical part comes first below, then our reading.

Command of the season (de ling): your day master's element is Wang in the autumn season (the five-states chapter above) - the ruling position, full command: 3 of 3. Ground (de di): 3 of your 3 other branches carry your day master's element or the element that feeds it as primary qi: 3 of 3. Those are year 丑 (a resource at primary qi), day 辰 (a resource at primary qi) and hour 未 (a resource at primary qi). Visible help (de shi): no Resource or Peer stem among your visible stems: 0 of 3. Total 6 of 9: strong on this report's weighting (strong from 5, middle from 3, thin below that - the weights are stated in full at daypillar.com/methodology).

The weighting points to a well-supported day master: a chart with reserves, able to absorb pressure from demanding stems without being overwhelmed. On this reading such a chart can carry wealth and officer - use what the world offers rather than merely withstand it.

Because your day master reads as strong, classical practice sorts the five elements around it into those that feed your chart and those that tax it.

With reserves behind it, your chart is read as able to spend: water, which you produce; wood, which you grasp; and even fire, the pressure that disciplines, are the elements the tradition puts to work in such a chart. The watch-list inverts: more metal or earth - support already held in abundance - is read as excess to be vented rather than accumulated.

Your day master, Yang Metal (Geng 庚), was born into autumn, where metal sits at Wang: commanding the season outright - the strongest of the five states.

That reading feeds directly into strength: read as strong, you lean on water, wood and fire and pay for metal and earth - you also stand rooted in the year and month branches, not resting on the stems alone.

Your five registers say what your chart is loud and quiet about: Resource loudest at 3 of 7, Officer silent at zero. The Resource weight sits in your year branch's hidden 己, your day branch's hidden 戊 and your hour branch's hidden 己.

Your day branch combines with your month branch (酉). Your day stem combines with both your year stem (乙) and your month stem (乙). The branches and stems chapters above cover what each relation means.

Your current decade, 辛巳, reads as your ROB WEALTH - Peer register, a register your natal chart holds in the middle, neither loud nor quiet.

Your four pillars are also read as four palaces, each holding a different region of a life: origins and the wider society, parents and the climate of work, the self, and children and the later years. The table sets out what stands in each of yours - the visible stem and its ten god, the branch with its primary qi's role, and the named relations that touch it - using the classifications from the chapters above.

Two readings converge on your day branch Chen (辰), because it sits directly beneath the day master itself. First, the twelve-stage cycle covered earlier in this report: on its own day branch, your day master Geng (庚) carries the Yang stage - quiet accumulation, growing toward the next Chang Sheng. Second, every stem hidden inside 辰 carries its own ten-god role against that day master, not only the primary qi in the table: 戊 as your Indirect Resource, 乙 as your Direct Wealth and 癸 as your Hurting Officer. The day branch is also read as the intimate sphere, so this pairing - the day master's own stage on its own foundation - reads as a compact self-portrait.

On top of your four fixed pillars, classical practice reads a second layer of the sequence of ten-year luck pillars, each one a stem-branch pair like the ones you were born with, laid over the chart one decade at a time. The sequence starts from your month pillar and steps through the sixty-pair cycle once per decade. It runs forward for a yang year stem paired with a male chart, or a yin year stem paired with a female one, and backward for the opposite pairing. This report was generated for a stated gender because the direction genuinely depends on it; there is no gender-neutral version of this chapter to fall back on.

Your year stem 乙 is yin, and this chart is male: that pairing runs the sequence backward - each decade below steps back through the cycle from your month pillar, 乙酉. The first decade opens around age 11 - an age counted the traditional way, in which the year you were born is year one, so it runs one ahead of a birthday count. Before that age the chart is read from the natal pillars alone, exactly as the rest of this report reads it. The exact onset date is a matter of which counting method a school uses and is not printed here for that reason - the age is what the method fixes, a specific day would overstate it.

Key to the ten-god column: INDIRECT WEALTH (wealth as opportunity - windfalls and enterprise, not salary); HURTING OFFICER (brilliance with an edge - output in its sharp register); EATING GOD (appetite and creativity - output in its comfortable register); ROB WEALTH (rival energy, boldness, rivalry over shared resources); FRIEND (peers, self-reliance, and competition among equals); DIRECT RESOURCE (support through proper channels - education, protection, tradition); INDIRECT RESOURCE (support through unconventional learning, intuition, outside mentors); DIRECT OFFICER (authority in its proper form - duty, structure, legitimacy); SEVEN KILLINGS (authority in its raw form - pressure, drive, challenge); DIRECT WEALTH (wealth as steady income - diligence, salary, routine gains).

Read these ten decades as climates crossing fixed terrain, not as a schedule of events. A decade under a register already thin or crowded in your natal chart is traditionally felt more, not less. Your four natal pillars set what you are working with; the luck pillars are what moves through it.

What you are holding is a faithful reading of your own chart - 乙丑 乙酉 庚辰 癸未 - under stated conventions, with every computational step auditable. What it is not: a prediction. The classical literature this report draws its vocabulary from describes tendencies and climates, not decrees, and any practitioner who tells you the pillars compel outcomes is going beyond what even the old texts claim.

Three conventions decide a chart, and honest engines differ on each. The day boundary: whether the day pillar rolls over at 23:00 or at midnight - this engine keeps the current day for a 23:00-23:59 true-solar birth. Your birth does not sit in that window, so the choice makes no difference to your day pillar; it does for roughly one hour in twenty-four of births generally.

The hour branch: fixed from true solar time at your birth longitude - clock time corrected for the historical zone offset, for longitude and for the equation of time - because near a two-hour boundary those minutes decide the branch. The year and month: compared against the solar terms in standard time, never in true solar time, which silently produces wrong years near a term boundary.

If you believe the chart itself is wrong, email daypillar@gmail.com with the reference printed on the first page. A genuine casting error is fixed, refunded beyond the normal window, added to a public errata log, and entered into our test corpus as a permanent case - that is how the corpus you can read today grew. Most disagreements turn out to be the school differences above. To re-derive any claim yourself, cast the same birth details on the free calculator at daypillar.com/bazi-calculator and compare its correction chain against the derivation appendix at the end of this document. The full test corpus is public at daypillar.com/verification.

Your day pillar 庚辰 carries a second classical name as well as a ten-gods reading: it is the 17th pair of the sixty, and that position alone fixes its nayin. There are thirty such names, each pairing an element with an image, shared by every two consecutive pillars. The system runs alongside this report rather than feeding into it: fixed by position, so no judgement and no school disagreement, only counting.

Li Xuzhong (Tang dynasty) - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny

Xu Ziping (Song dynasty) - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny

Yuan Hai Zi Ping - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny

San Ming Tong Hui - zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E4%B8%89%E5%91%BD%E9%80%9A%E6%9C%83/%E5%8D%B7%E4%BA%8C

The hidden-stem table this report uses

Di Tian Sui - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny

The Ten Gods vocabulary

NOAA Solar Calculator - gml.noaa.gov/grad/solcalc/calcdetails.html

IANA Time Zone Database - www.iana.org/time-zones

Published stem-relation tables (five combinations, four oppositions) - zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A9%E5%B9%B2

Four Pillars of Destiny: luck cycles - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny

The twelve life stages (Chang Sheng cycle) - ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8D%81%E4%BA%8C%E9%81%8B

The five seasonal states (Wuxing Dayi) - zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E4%BA%94%E8%A1%8C%E5%A4%A7%E7%BE%A9/2

Published branch-trio and six-combine tables (san he, san hui, liu he) - zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%B0%E6%94%AF

The nayin table (Wu Xing Na Yin) - ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B4%8D%E9%9F%B3

What each source was checked to say, in full, is published at daypillar.com/methodology.