Natal Chart原局

The Natal Chart is the set of four pillars built from the year, month, day, and hour of your birth. Each pillar stacks a heavenly stem over an earthly branch, so four pillars make eight characters, which is why English books often call the whole system the Four Pillars. The first character of its Korean name means origin, and the chart is handled in that spirit: set at birth and unchanged for life. Luck Pillars, which turn every ten years, and Annual Luck, which turns every year, are layers passing over it, so a reading takes in the chart first and adds those layers afterwards.

• 原origin, source (Korean reading: won)
• 局board, layout (Korean reading: guk)

A board laid out from the very start: the arrangement of eight characters fixed at birth.

The Year Pillar turns at the Start of Spring (Lichun), and the Month Pillar at each of the twelve monthly solar term boundaries. For the Day Pillar, the date becomes an unbroken count of days matched to the cycle of sixty stem-branch pairs. The Hour Pillar takes its branch from two-hour blocks and its stem from a fixed rule keyed to the Day Master. Daylight saving time is stripped out first, and the true solar time adjustment touches the Day and Hour Pillars only; the Year and Month Pillars compare the real, unadjusted moment with each boundary.

Rather than taking the characters one by one, a reading first looks at how all eight get along. Next come which elements are plentiful or scarce, where the characters that support or press on the Day Master sit, and whether combinations or clashes link any pair. One traditional view likens the year to the root, the month to the stalk, the day to the flower, and the hour to the fruit, weighting each seat differently. With the birth hour unknown, the chart is read from three pillars and six characters.

For a birth in Seoul at 14:30 on 12 May 1990, the chart is a 庚午 (Geng Wu) year, 辛巳 (Xin Si) month, 丁丑 (Ding Chou) day, and 丁未 (Ding Wei) hour. The adjusted time is 14:02, so the hour stays in the 未 (Wei) block.

• A common idea

  Entering a lunar birthday produces a different Natal Chart.

  How we read it

  A lunar date is converted to its solar calendar date first, and the same solar term boundaries apply from there, so one moment of birth yields one chart. Choosing the wrong leap month setting, though, moves the calculation to another day.

• A common idea

  Because the chart is fixed, your life is already settled.

  How we read it

  The chart stays the same only because a birth happens at a single moment. This service treats it as material for reflecting on your own leanings, not as a conclusion.