Reading a day through the four pillars means comparing today's stem-and-branch pair, the day pillar, against the day master in your own chart. This tool works out that comparison, answers with one of the ten gods, and sets out in a paragraph how tradition reads that relation. The next seven days are shown the same way, so you can see which relation lands on which date.
Birth details stay in this browser. Nothing is sent to a server, and the store is shared with the Saju chart tool, so entering them in one place means not entering them again in the other. The Forget link clears them.
No sex is asked for. The ten-year luck cycles run forwards or backwards depending on it, but a daily reading does not, so there is nowhere for it to enter this calculation.
In the four pillars, the character that stands for you is the stem of the day pillar — the day master. A daily reading compares today's pillar against that one character. The result of the comparison is a ten god, and that is the answer this tool gives.
Say your day master is Geng, and today's pillar is Yi-Si. The stem Yi is wood and Geng is metal; metal controls wood, so this is the relation where you control the other. Geng is a yang stem and Yi a yin stem, so the polarities cross. Put the two together and you have Direct Wealth.
The branch is compared the same way, except that it is read through its main hidden stem rather than the branch character itself. That is the convention the chart table in the Saju tool uses, so the two pages never disagree on a value.
The first is the day master itself. Schools differ on whether to correct a birth time for the longitude of the birthplace, and on where to cut the day. A birth after 23:00 in particular rolls into the next day's pillar where the late-Zi hour is recognised, shifting the stem by one. Shift the stem and every ten god changes with it, so the results cannot match.
The second is interpretation. One source reads Direct Wealth as a day for steady accumulation and another as a day to watch spending. That is a consequence of there being more than one tradition, not of one side getting the arithmetic wrong. This tool picks one widely used reading, writes it out as a fixed paragraph, and says on screen that it is not the only one.
So when a result differs from somewhere else, there is a fixed place to look. Check whether both sources give the same day master; if they do, the difference is interpretation rather than calculation. If they do not, the evidence block in the Saju chart tool lists what got corrected, and that shows where the two parted.
There is no need to learn ten separate items. Fix the five element relations first, then split each on polarity. The five are: the same as me, I produce it, I control it, it controls me, it produces me.
Matching polarity lets the force arrive straight; crossed polarity makes it arrive twisted. So the producing relation gives the mild Eating God when polarities match and the sharp Hurting Officer when they cross. The controlling relation gives head-on Seven Killings when they match and rule-shaped Direct Officer when they cross.
The Direct and Indirect halves of the names mark exactly that split. Among the wealth, officer and resource gods, the crossed-polarity one is Direct and the matching one is Indirect. The rule is short enough that knowing the two axes beats memorising the ten.
The void is the pair of branches left empty relative to your day pillar. Lay the sixty terms out in runs of ten stems and two of the twelve branches never find a partner in that run; those two are the void for that day pillar.
Tradition reads such a place as one where force does not settle. So when today's branch is one of your void branches, the day's verdict is not taken at face value but a step weaker — a good relation less good, a difficult one less difficult.
This tool calculates the void and marks whether it applies. It does not discount the verdict automatically: how far to discount it varies by school, and quietly adjusting a number on screen hides the basis for it.
The four pillars look at time in several layers at once. The luck cycles run in ten-year steps, forwards or backwards according to sex and the polarity of the year stem. The year, month and day pillars each get compared against your day master in turn.
Different layers can give different answers. A day whose year pillar is Direct Officer and whose day pillar is Hurting Officer is a sharp-tongued day inside an orderly year. Combining layers into a single verdict is interpretation, not calculation, and this tool stops short of it.
The layers live on different pages. Luck cycles and the year pillar are tabled on one screen in the Saju chart tool, while this page stays on the day — nobody who came to look at today needs a ten-year table first.
It does not predict what will happen. What it calculates is one thing — how today's stem relates to your day master — and it then relays how tradition has read that relation. That is why the sentences end in how a day is read rather than in what a day will bring.
It does not score luck. A screen that graded the ten gods and announced today as 87 out of 100 would be easy to build, but no rule produces that number. A figure with no basis is worse for looking like a calculation.
It also makes no compatibility, date-selection or naming judgements. Those are separate rule systems; this page handles the day pillar only.
In two places. One is how your day master is derived — whether true solar time is corrected for, and whether a birth after 23:00 rolls the day pillar over to the next day, either of which can shift the stem by one. The other is how the same ten god is read, and that is a difference of school rather than of arithmetic.
It is the stem-and-branch pair assigned to a date. The sixty-term cycle advances one step per day without interruption, so the pair depends on the date alone, not on months or solar terms. That is why the day pillar can be shown before you enter anything.
Along two axes. The five-element relation between your stem and the other one splits five ways — same, I produce it, I control it, it controls me, it produces me — and each of those splits again on whether the polarities match, giving ten.
Not advisable. The tool calculates what the traditional rules produce and has no predictive power at all. Read it for interest and make decisions on the information decisions need.
What this tool bases its numbers on, and how far those numbers go.
Day luck = ten god (your day master, the stem of today's day pillar). A ten god is fixed by the five-element relation between two stems (same, produces, controls) crossed with whether their polarities match. The day master comes from the same buildChart the Saju tool uses.Day master Geng (yang metal) · today's pillar Yi-Si, stem Yi (yin wood) → metal controls wood, polarities cross → Direct Wealth