Korean Birth Chart Free Calculator: How to Read Saju in 60s

Your Korean Birth Chart Is Less Intimidating Than You Think

The first time most people encounter a Korean Saju birth chart, they see a grid of eight unfamiliar Chinese-style characters and immediately close the tab. It looks like ancient code. It feels like something only a trained master could decode.

Here is the truth: the basic structure of a Saju chart is logical, systematic, and — with the right free tool and a short guide — surprisingly readable within a single sitting. You do not need to study classical Chinese or spend years in apprenticeship to understand what your chart is saying at a foundational level.

This guide walks you through exactly what information you need to generate an accurate chart, how to interpret the output a free Korean birth chart calculator gives you, and where the real limits of a free reading lie. By the end, you will know how to read your own four pillars in under sixty seconds — and you will know what questions to ask next.

1. What Information You Need to Generate a Saju Chart

A Saju chart — literally four pillars of destiny — is built from four units of time: your birth year, birth month, birth day, and birth hour. Each pillar consists of two characters, giving you eight characters total. To calculate those pillars correctly, a calculator needs precise inputs.

Exact Birth Date

This means the full calendar date: day, month, and year. Saju uses the solar calendar (양력, yangnyeok), not the lunar calendar. This is a common source of confusion because many older Korean family records, especially from the mid-twentieth century and earlier, recorded births on the lunar calendar (음력, eumllyeok). If your birth record is lunar, you must convert it to the solar equivalent before entering it into a calculator. Most modern free tools include a lunar-to-solar conversion toggle — use it.

Exact Birth Hour

This is the most critical input, and it is where most beginner readings go wrong. The Hour pillar — your fourth pillar — changes every two hours throughout the day. A difference of a single hour on either side of a two-hour boundary produces a completely different fourth pillar and changes your element balance. If you only know you were born "in the morning" or "around noon," your chart is incomplete at best and misleading at worst. Check your birth certificate. Ask a parent. The effort is worth it.

Birth Timezone

Saju calculations are ultimately based on solar time, not the administrative time zone you happen to live in. For readers in the Korean diaspora — in North America, Europe, or Australia — this matters enormously. If you were born in Los Angeles, your local clock time is the correct input, but you must make sure the calculator knows your birth location or time zone so it can convert correctly. Entering Seoul time when you were born in Chicago will shift every single pillar.

True Solar Time Correction (Ideal)

Advanced Saju practitioners also apply a true solar time correction, which adjusts for the difference between your birth city's actual longitudinal position and the standard time zone meridian. This correction can shift the Hour pillar by up to thirty minutes in either direction. Free tools do not always apply this correction, but the better ones offer it as an option. If precision matters to you, look for a tool that includes a local mean time or true solar time toggle.

2. Free vs. Paid Korean Birth Chart Tools: What to Expect

Free Korean birth chart calculators have become widely available online, and many of them are genuinely useful for a first reading. Understanding what they do and do not provide helps you set accurate expectations.

What Free Tools Typically Offer

• The four pillars grid: eight characters arranged in two rows (Heavenly Stems on top, Earthly Branches on bottom)
• Day Master identification: your core elemental self, explained below
• Five Element tally: a breakdown of how many Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water characters appear in your chart
• Basic pillar-by-pillar labels: Year, Month, Day, Hour
• Sometimes a short personality summary based on your Day Master element

This is genuinely enough to begin understanding yourself through the Saju lens. For many curious readers, the free output alone provides meaningful insight.

What Paid or In-Depth Readings Add

• Luck pillars (대운, daeun): ten-year cycles that describe the broad energetic terrain of your life phases — these require significant interpretation skill
• Annual year forecasts: how the energy of a given year interacts with your natal chart
• Compatibility analysis: comparing two charts character by character
• Personalized narrative readings by a human practitioner

If you are making a significant life decision or want nuanced guidance, a paid reading from a knowledgeable practitioner adds depth a free calculator cannot replicate. But for learning the language of Saju and understanding your foundational chart, starting free is entirely appropriate.

3. Reading the Output: Your Eight Characters and Four Pillars

Once you generate your chart, you will see a two-by-four grid. The top row holds the four Heavenly Stems (천간, cheongan); the bottom row holds the four Earthly Branches (지지, jiji). Each column is a pillar.

What Each Pillar Represents

Year Pillar (연주, Yeonju) — The outermost layer of your identity. It reflects inherited tendencies, ancestral energy, and the social or cultural environment you were born into. In interpersonal readings, it also represents how strangers or society at large perceive you.

Month Pillar (월주, Wolju) — Often called the career pillar. It reflects your professional tendencies, public social role, ambitions, and the environment of your upbringing. Practitioners pay close attention to this pillar when discussing vocation and life direction.

Day Pillar (일주, Ilju) — The most personal pillar. The Heavenly Stem of this pillar is your Day Master — the core of who you are. The Earthly Branch of the Day pillar is traditionally associated with your spouse or closest intimate partner, and with your adult inner life.

Hour Pillar (시주, Siju) — The innermost and most private dimension. It reflects your hidden inner world, latent talents, children (in classical interpretation), and the quality of your later years in life.

Think of the four pillars as concentric layers moving inward: from societal inheritance, to professional self, to intimate self, to hidden inner self.

4. Spotting Your Day Master

The Day Master is the single most important character in your entire chart. It is the Heavenly Stem in the Day pillar — the upper character in the third column from the left.

There are ten Heavenly Stems, each associated with one of the Five Elements in either a Yin or Yang polarity:

• Wood: expansive, growth-oriented, principled
• Fire: expressive, passionate, visionary
• Earth: stable, nurturing, practical
• Metal: precise, disciplined, principled under pressure
• Water: adaptive, intuitive, deep

Your Day Master element describes your core nature — how you process the world, where you draw energy from, and what you fundamentally need to thrive. Everything else in the chart is interpreted in relation to your Day Master. A strong Day Master suggests self-sufficiency and resilience; a weak Day Master suggests someone who draws strength from external support and collaboration.

Free tools will typically identify your Day Master and give you a brief description. This alone is worth the sixty seconds it takes to generate your chart.

5. Counting Five Element Balance

Once you have your eight characters, count how many belong to each of the Five Elements. Include both the Heavenly Stems and the Earthly Branches. (Note: each Earthly Branch also contains hidden Heavenly Stems called jijijanggan, which advanced practitioners factor in, but free tools usually surface the primary element only.)

Interpreting the Balance

• An element appearing three or more times is considered in excess. This element's qualities become overpowering — for example, excess Water can manifest as overthinking, emotional overwhelm, or difficulty with decisiveness.
• An element absent or appearing only once is considered deficient. You may unconsciously seek out that element's qualities in partners, environments, or career paths. Deficient Fire, for instance, may mean you are drawn to warm, expressive people or careers involving public engagement.
• A relatively even distribution across all five elements suggests natural versatility, though it can also mean less dominant, defining strengths.

This elemental map gives you a quick personality and tendency profile that is distinctly different from Western astrology's sign-based system — it is about energetic proportion, not categorical type.

6. Common Mistakes When Entering Data

Even with the best tool, bad inputs produce meaningless outputs. Watch for these frequent errors:

• Wrong timezone for diaspora readers: If you were born outside Korea, your birth time is your local birth time. Do not convert it to Korean Standard Time unless the calculator explicitly asks for that.
• Guessing the birth hour: "Around lunchtime" spans a two-hour pillar boundary. If you genuinely do not know your birth hour, some practitioners recommend using a rectification process or simply noting that your Hour pillar is uncertain.
• Entering a lunar date as a solar date: If your family documents record the lunar birthday (which is common in traditional Korean households), entering that date directly without conversion will produce an incorrect Year and Month pillar.
• Ignoring daylight saving time: If you were born in a country that observes DST, your birth certificate time may be one hour ahead of standard time. Check whether your tool accounts for this automatically.

7. What a Free Reading Cannot Tell You

A foundational four-pillar chart is a snapshot of your natal energy — the hand you were dealt at birth. But Saju's deeper power lies in understanding how that hand plays out over time.

Luck pillars (대운, daeun) are ten-year cycles that describe the dominant energetic weather of each phase of your life. They shift the relationship between your Day Master and the surrounding elements dramatically. A free calculator rarely includes a full luck pillar analysis.

Annual forecasts examine how the energy of a specific year — its Heavenly Stem and Earthly Branch — interacts with your natal chart and current luck pillar. This is where practical guidance about timing decisions becomes possible.

Compatibility readings involve comparing two people's charts character by character, examining how their Day Masters interact and whether their elemental compositions complement or clash. This is a nuanced art that goes well beyond a simple compatibility score.

Knowing these limits is not discouraging — it is clarifying. A free chart gives you the foundation. Deeper analysis builds upward from there.

Start With Your Chart Today

Now that you know exactly what to input and how to read what comes back, there is no reason to keep putting it off. Your four pillars, Day Master, and elemental balance are waiting — and they take less than sixty seconds to surface.

If you are ready to generate your own Korean birth chart for free, visit sajuapp.app and enter your birth details. The tool is built with English-speaking beginners in mind, and the output is designed to be readable without a practitioner's guidance. Consider it your starting point for a much longer, genuinely fascinating conversation with your own chart.