before I read your chart, let me tell you what you are actually looking at. Without this the rest is just decoration.
A very long time ago, Chinese astronomers wanted a way to name a moment in time that would never repeat. So they built a calendar out of two interlocking wheels: ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches. Turn them together and you get sixty pairings before the pattern comes round again, which is why a Chinese lifetime is counted in sixties, not centuries.
Every year gets a pair. So does every month, every day, and every two-hour slice of the day. Your birth moment therefore has four pairs, eight characters. That is all 八字 means. Eight characters.
Here is the part that matters. Each of those characters carries one of five elements, wood, fire, earth, metal, water. So your eight characters are not a timestamp. They are a recipe: how much of each thing you arrived holding, and which ones you barely got at all.
And one character is you. The top of the day pillar. That has not changed in two thousand years of practice: you are read from the day you were born, and everything else in the chart is read in relation to you. That is the whole art. Not "what does the chart say", but what is standing around this one character, and does it feed them or crowd them?
Of the eight characters you were born with, one is you. Here it is first, then the other seven it is read against.
Read right to left, oldest to newest. Your day pillar is ringed in gold, that one is you. Tap or hover any pillar.
Top row = heavenly stems · middle = earthly branches (your animals) · then each pillar's role in relation to you, and the stems hidden inside the branch. Every label is in English with its Chinese beside it, and the colour repeats the element.
That is who you are. Whether it works for you or against you depends on what surrounds that one character, which is the next step.
All eight characters and what is hidden inside them, counted by element. What is missing usually says more than what is abundant.
Wood burns to make fire. Fire leaves ash, which is earth. Earth compresses into metal. Metal collects water. Water grows wood again. Nothing here is symbolic. It is a farmer's description of how the world actually behaves, written down and kept.
That balance does not land on every part of your life equally. Next: where it lands, and when.
The same four pillars, read a second way: each one governs an area of your life. Then the ten-year seasons that move across all of them.
If you have heard of the twelve palaces, those belong to a different system, 紫微斗數, which casts its own chart from scratch. BaZi has four, and these are yours. We would rather show you four that genuinely come from your chart than borrow twelve from one we never cast.
Your eight characters never change. The weather around them does, in ten-year blocks called 大運, "the great movement". Each block lays a new pair of characters over your chart for a decade, feeding some parts and squeezing others, which is why two people with identical charts can have different decades. You do not choose these. You can only know which one you are standing in. Drag the marker, or tap a decade.
You now have who, what, where and when. The last step is the only one that asks anything of you.
Everything above, turned into something you can act on.
Named configurations, read as leanings rather than verdicts. A secondary layer, the pillars and elements above carry far more weight.
神煞 are the most debated layer of BaZi, many practitioners treat them as colour rather than structure. Read them as leanings, never as fixed traits.