Every line of your reading names the rule that produced it. This page documents those rules — including the places where tradition disagrees with itself.
Your date, clock time and birthplace are converted to the four pillars (年月日时): year, month, day and hour, each a pair of a Heavenly Stem and an Earthly Branch. The birthplace matters because the pillars use true solar time — clock time corrected for your longitude within your time zone. A birth at 12:30 in Kashgar is a different solar noon than one in Shanghai; the engine uses city-level coordinates and timezone data to correct for it.
The five phases — solid lines clockwise show the generative cycle (相生), dashed lines the overcoming cycle (相克).
The Day Stem — the second stem of your chart — is the Day Master, the “you” of the reading. We weigh how much the rest of the chart supports or drains it (month branch weighted highest, then day branch, then the remainder) and classify it as relatively strong, weak, or near balance. That single judgement drives most of what follows, which is why we show the percentage split in the reading itself.
A common misconception: “my chart lacks Water, so I should add Water.” Not necessarily. What helps the chart is the element that rebalances the Day Master — sometimes an element you already have plenty of is the last one you should add, and a scarce element may actively hurt. The reading therefore lists favourable (喜用) and unfavourable (忌用) elements together, derived from the strength calculation, and the colour and stone suggestions follow that pair — never the “missing” list.
Each remaining stem and branch is expressed as one of the ten gods (比劫, 食伤, 财, 官杀, 印 families) relative to the Day Master. The balance of these families shapes the per-area readings — love, career, wealth, family, study, calm. Separately, each decade of your life runs under a luck pillar (大运), and each year a year pillar (流年). A decade and a single year can fairly carry different ratings: the decade sets the weather, the year is one day of it. The quiz explains both scales side by side.
Same birth data, same reading — every time, byte for byte. There is no “daily fortune” shuffle, because a chart that changes every visit cannot be reasoned about, checked, or trusted. Text selection within your reading uses stable hashing of the chart itself, so two people with identical charts receive identical text.
BaZi is a traditional interpretive system, not a science. Our engine applies its rules consistently and transparently; it does not make the rules true. Readings on SoulPulse are offered for cultural and entertainment purposes, and product suggestions follow the tradition's symbolism — they are ornaments, not medicine, investments or guarantees.