THE FIVE PHASES · LESSON 3 OF 7 · 14 MIN
The Four Pillars of Destiny
Bazi, the "eight characters" of a birth — the year, month, day and hour each written as a stem and a branch — the Day Master, the balance of the phases, and how the pillars are worked out.
In Western astrology a birth is a map of the sky. In Chinese Four Pillars astrology — sìzhù, also called bāzì, "eight characters" — it is a date. The year, month, day and hour of birth are each written as a pair of characters from the sixty-cycle, a heavenly stem above an earthly branch, and those eight characters are read through the five phases.