Method
How we calculate your chart
Saju turns the moment of your birth into four pillars — year, month, day and hour — each written with two characters: a heavenly stem and an earthly branch. Every character belongs to one of five elements. The reading interprets those eight characters and how they relate.
Most Saju mistakes are time mistakes. These are the rules our engine follows, every time, for every reader:
1. Your clock time becomes a real instant
We look up the time zone of your birthplace and its rules on your birth date — including historical daylight saving (for example, South Korea used UTC+10 in the summers of 1987–88).
2. Year and month follow the solar terms
In Saju the year begins at Ipchun (입춘, the start of spring, around February 4), and each month begins at a solar term — not on the 1st. We use the exact minute of each term, evaluated for the instant you were born, wherever you were born.
3. Day and hour follow the sun at your birthplace
Clock time is set for a whole time zone, but the sun is local. We convert your birth to true solar time using your birthplace longitude and the equation of time.
Example: our sample person was born at 09:20 in Seoul — 08:43 by the sun (-37 minutes).
The day changes at 23:00 solar time, the traditional start of the Rat hour (자시).
4. If you don’t know your birth time
We read your year, month and day pillars — six characters — and say so clearly. We never guess an hour. If your time falls close to a boundary between two hours or two days, your result tells you.
5. Elements, traits and your animal
- Element balance counts each visible character once, so you can compare it with any standard Saju chart.
- Traits are symbolic stars (신살) found from your day stem, day branch and year branch, plus your day pillar’s life stage (12운성). Every chart shows three; the Full Reading explains all of them.
- Your animal is the Korean nickname for your day pillar: the stem’s colour (blue, red, golden, white, black) and the branch’s animal. It’s a name tag — the interpretation comes from the characters themselves.
6. Who writes what
The chart is computed by deterministic code — the same input always gives the same chart, and an AI never calculates it. Free results are written by us.
The Full Reading is written by an AI model that receives only your calculated chart and our Saju writing guidelines, and is required to cite your actual characters.
Engine sixtysigns-engine-1.0 · rules sixtysigns-stars-v2. Bornimal is for entertainment and self-reflection. It does not predict events or replace professional advice.