What is Saju? Definition and the eight-character structure
Saju is the four-column dataset of a person's year, month, day, and hour of birth — each column written as a pair of Heavenly Stem and Earthly Branch. The resulting eight characters form palja, the foundation from which Korean four-pillars astrology reads innate temperament and life cycles.
Four pillars, eight characters
Saju consists of four pillars. The year pillar marks the year of birth, the month pillar the month, the day pillar the day, and the hour pillar the hour.
Each pillar pairs one Heavenly Stem with one Earthly Branch. Four pillars times two characters yield eight characters — palja, the eight characters of fate.
Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches
There are ten Heavenly Stems (Gap, Eul, Byeong, Jeong, Mu, Gi, Gyeong, Sin, Im, Gye) carrying both yin-yang polarity and the five elements. There are twelve Earthly Branches (Ja, Chuk, In, Myo, Jin, Sa, O, Mi, Sin, Yu, Sul, Hae), each linked to a zodiac animal.
The two series combine into 60 unique pairs — the sexagenary cycle. Every pillar of a Saju chart is one of these 60 combinations.
Converted through the perpetual calendar
A solar birth date plus an accurate birth hour, mapped through perpetual-calendar data, yields the four pillars. The more precise the hour, the richer the reading.
What Saju shows — and what it does not
Saju maps innate disposition, the relative strength of the five elements, and the seasonal flow of energies. It does not deliver deterministic predictions of specific events — that is the interpreter's overreach, not the chart.
FAQ about this topic
Are Saju and Saju-palja different?
They name the same data. Saju refers to the four pillars; palja refers to the eight characters that make them up.
Can a Saju reading be done without a known birth hour?
Missing the hour pillar reduces accuracy in late-life and offspring readings and in finer personality cues, but the remaining three pillars still support a broad reading.
Lunar or solar birth date?
Either works. Saju is calculated by solar terms, so a solar birth date produces the same four pillars as the corresponding lunar date.
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Last updated: 2026-05-21