The eight characters of birth date, also known as the four pillars, or simply the eight characters, are another way of saying the "four pillars and eight characters" in the fortune-telling terminology of the Book of Changes. The four pillars refer to the time at the moment a person is born (i.e., the four time points of year, month, day, and hour), respectively with one heavenly stem (i.e., A, B, C, D, E, Ji, Geng, Xin, and Ren). , Gui) and an earthly branch (i.e. Zi, Chou, Yin, Mao, Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Xu, Hai) are matched to form a pillar, which consists of the year pillar, the month pillar, and the day pillar. , the hour pillars are arranged and combined in sequence and are called four pillars.
Since each column has two characters and four columns have eight characters, fortune telling is also called "testing eight characters". According to the yin and yang, the five elements, the ten gods, the restraint of life, the combination of punishment and harm, the sound of the stems and branches, etc., we can speculate on the fate of people (that is, wealth, wealth, poverty, good and bad luck).
When predicting a person's destiny using birthdates and horoscopes, the first step is to convert the person's birth time into four pillars and horoscopes. This process is called "horoscope arrangement". The information of the eight-character arrangement includes four pillars, stems and branches, ten gods, solar terms, gods, great luck, small luck, fleeting years, fetus, life palace, etc. In the past, horoscope arrangement required knowledge of the astronomical calendar, celestial stems, earthly branches, 24 solar terms, etc., and the help of a perpetual calendar reference book. Nowadays, the work of horoscope arrangement has basically been done with high-tech tools (computers and mobile phones). software) replaced.
The following is an example to illustrate. Assume that a certain male was born at 16:10:05 pm on October 1, 1949 in the Gregorian calendar. The birth area is Jincheng City, Shanxi Province. Then this birth time corresponds to The four pillars and eight characters are: Jichou, Guiyou, Jiazi, Renshen.
The detailed information of the eight-character layout is as follows: