System
What is Bazi?
Draft — page expanding
Bazi (八字, “eight characters”), the Four Pillars of Destiny, is the classical Chinese time-based astrological system. A birth moment is encoded into eight characters: four Heavenly Stems over four Earthly Branches, one pair each for the Year, Month, Day, and Hour pillars, drawn from the 60-term sexagenary cycle. The Day Stem, the Day Master, is the reference point against which every other element is interpreted. The Five Phases (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water) and yin-yang polarity are the analytical framework; the Ten Gods name each character’s relationship to the Day Master, the chart’s “character cast.” The Dayun, ten-year luck cycles, overlay additional stem-branch influence decade by decade. The Song-era form is the Zi Ping (子平) system; the same structure is read in Korea as Saju and in Japan as Shichū Suimei. In Divination Nexus Bazi is the East-Asian structural layer — the personal elemental constitution and its timing.
What job does it do?
Chart, Today. Epistemic badge: constitutional.
What is traditional, and what is our interpretive layer?
Traditional: the eight-character cast of stems and branches, the Day Master, the Five Phases, the Ten Gods, and the Dayun luck cycles — the classical Zi Ping method. Interpretive: Divination Nexus renders the chart as a grid and maps its elements onto the 12 Inner Alignment Dimensions; it computes a Day Master but adds no Western-style rising.
Traditional mechanic, tables, and named sources live in the vault file Celestial-Bazi.md.
What is it not?
It is not a tropical Western natal wheel. It is not a fake cast from a date unless the engine is honestly computational. Harm-capable historic verdicts are documented, not performed.
Tools & books
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