Can you read saju without knowing your birth time?
Updated ·
Yes. The two characters of the hour pillar are left empty and the reading uses the other six.
Two of the eight characters drop out
Saju has four pillars and eight characters: year, month, day and hour. The year, month and day pillars come from the birth date. Only the hour pillar needs the birth time.
Without the time, the two characters of the hour pillar are left empty and the reading uses six. The day stem, read as the core of temperament, sits in the day pillar, so it does not change.
Why the hour is not filled with a guess
Filling an unknown time with something like noon creates two hour-pillar characters that do not exist. Those characters carry elements too, so the element balance shifts to an eight-character basis and the reading changes without any sign of it.
When the time is unknown, SAJUDORIM calculates with the hour pillar empty and counts the elements over six characters.
If you know the time roughly
The hour pillar changes every two hours: 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. is the Rat hour (子), 1 to 3 a.m. the Ox hour (丑), 3 to 5 a.m. the Tiger hour (寅), and so on. If you know you were born around 4 a.m., the Tiger hour fits.
If the time you remember sits on the line between two hours, it is better to calculate both and compare.
Questions
- Is the result wrong without a birth time?
- It is narrower, not wrong. The year, month and day pillars come from the date and stay the same; only the hour pillar drops out. If you were born on the day a solar term changes, the month pillar can depend on the time, and in that case SAJUDORIM uses noon to set the year, month and day pillars.
- I was born at 11 p.m. Which day counts?
- SAJUDORIM treats 11 p.m. as the start of the next day, because the Rat hour begins at 11 p.m. Some schools keep 11 p.m. to midnight on the same day instead.