Once you have a Saju reading in front of you, the natural next question is: where do I look first? Eight characters, four pillars, ten gods, twelve life stages, two kinds of "favorable element" — it's a lot of vocabulary. The good news is that practitioners read in a consistent order, and once you know the order, the chart starts speaking with one voice instead of eight.
This guide walks through that order. By the end you should be able to look at your own chart and answer the questions a Saju reading is meant to answer: What is my elemental temperament? What energies tend to dominate my life? Where am I in my decade-long cycle, and what does this mean?
Your Day Master (日干, Ilgan) is the upper character of your day pillar. It's the third pillar from the left in most chart layouts. There are ten possible Day Masters, each a Heavenly Stem. We list them again here for reference:
Read the short character description for your Day Master and let it sit with you. This is your baseline temperament. It is not your whole personality — but it is the soil out of which everything else grows. If your Day Master is Yang Wood, the rest of your reading describes "what kind of season the tall tree is in." If it's Yin Water, the rest describes "what kind of landscape the dew is settling on."
The next thing a practitioner looks at is your Five Phase distribution — how much Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water you have across the eight characters (and their hidden stems). Every chart has all five phases in some quantity, but the proportions vary dramatically.
What you're looking for is the shape of your distribution:
Pay particular attention to what the phase of your Day Master looks like in this distribution. If your Day Master is Yang Wood and Wood is your strongest phase, you have a "rooted" tree — you can grow boldly. If your Day Master is Yang Wood but Wood is weak, you have a sapling that needs careful conditions.
This is the single most actionable concept in Saju, and most chart layouts call it out explicitly. Your Yong Shen (用神) is the phase that brings balance to your particular distribution. It's not a fixed label — it's specific to your chart.
The basic principle: if your chart is "strong" (your Day Master and supporting phases dominate), you need an element that drains or counterbalances the strength. If your chart is "gentle" (your Day Master and supporters are weak), you need an element that nourishes the Day Master.
Once you know your Yong Shen, the rest of the reading becomes more concrete. You can now ask:
This isn't fortune-telling — it's a hypothesis you can test against your own life experience. Many people find that once they know their Yong Shen, they can recognize patterns in their own history they hadn't named before.
The Ten Gods (十神, Shi Shen) describe the relationship between your Day Master and every other character in your chart. There are ten of them, each describing a different role:
Your reading will identify which Ten God is strongest in your chart. This is the energy that most shapes how the world meets you. A chart strong in Pian Cai often belongs to someone entrepreneurial, with a knack for opportunity and variable income. A chart strong in Zheng Yin often belongs to someone steady, supported by mentors and traditional learning.
The Ten Gods are roles, not labels. Having a strong Pian Cai doesn't mean you are only entrepreneurial — it means that energy is the most prominent way the world tends to engage you. Knowing your strongest Ten God gives you a clear vocabulary for a pattern you've probably already noticed.
So far, everything has been about your seed — the eight characters fixed at birth. But Saju also describes how that seed unfolds over time, and this is where the chart becomes practically useful.
Your Da Yun (大運) is a sequence of stem-branch pairs, each lasting ten years. The first one starts at a specific age (somewhere between 1 and 10, calculated from your birth date relative to the nearest solar term), and they continue throughout your life. You'll see all eight of them in your reading.
Find the one you're currently in. Read its Ten God. This is the weather of your decade. If your current Da Yun is a Shi Shen period, this is a decade of natural creative output and ease of expression — a good decade to build a body of work. If it's a Pian Guan period, this is a decade of sudden responsibilities and external pressure — a decade you grow under stress.
The transitions between Da Yun cycles are real. People often describe the year a Da Yun changes as one of the most disorienting of their lives, even when nothing dramatic happens externally — it's a subtle shift in what feels possible and what feels heavy. Knowing that your decade is about to change can be one of the most useful things a Saju reading offers.
Finally, look at the energy of this specific year. The Se Yun (歲運) layer adds the year's stem and branch on top of your seed and your Da Yun. It is the weather of the month-to-month, the smallest moving piece in the system.
Your reading will give the Ten God for the current year. Don't read this in isolation — read it together with your Da Yun. A year's Shi Shen energy in the middle of a Da Yun Pian Guan period plays differently than the same year energy in the middle of a Da Yun Zheng Yin period. The combination matters more than either alone.
Pull up your reading and answer these six questions in order:
If you can answer those six, you've read your chart. Everything else — the specific combinations, clashes, hidden stems, special structures — is depth, not foundation. Many readers spend years on the basics before they need anything more.
Ready to read your own chart? It takes 30 seconds.
Get my free reading →