Bazi: Chinese Astrology

Arcadia

Contains adsIn-app purchases

About this app

Bazi, the Four Pillars of Destiny, is the main system of Chinese astrology. A birth moment becomes four pillars - year, month, day and hour - each a heavenly stem over an earthly branch, and the whole chart is read around the stem of the day: the day master.

Everything is computed on the device. There is no ephemeris file, no account and no network call.

THE CHART
- Four pillars in Chinese with pinyin and English, hidden stems inside every branch
- The ten gods, named for each stem and each hidden stem against the day master
- Branch relations: clash, union, harm, harmony and punishment
- Element balance by weight, and the day master read as strong or weak with the arithmetic shown

TIME, DONE PROPERLY
- True solar time by default, with the longitude correction and the equation of time given as two separate numbers rather than folded into one
- The month breaks on the twelve jie solar terms, not on the calendar
- The Bazi year turns at Lichun in early February, which is not where the lunisolar new year falls
- Summer time is removed for you, from the historical record for that place in that year

LUCK PILLARS
- The ten-year sequence, forward or back, with the boundary term and the starting age it was derived from
- Annual pillars inside the running decade

SCHOOLS DISAGREE, SO THEY ARE SWITCHES
Whether the day turns at 23:00 and which clock the hour is read on are settings, each with the reasoning next to it rather than a silent choice made for you.

REFERENCE
Stems, branches, the ten gods and the relations, each with what your own chart contains marked, plus fourteen written articles.

ACCURACY
The solar terms are defined by the Sun's apparent longitude, and the Sun is computed here from analytic series that agree with JPL Horizons to about 1.4 arcseconds. Positions are checked in the app's own tests against that reference, not against another program.

Enter the birth time as the clock read it. Do not take an hour off for summer time - the app does that, using the rule in force at that place in that year.

Free to install, with ads. A single one-time purchase removes them.