The 60 Day Pillars

You have probably looked your Day Pillar up in a table of sixty personalities. Open another book and the description changes. Before deciding which one is right, there is something the tables do not tell you.

This article asks one question. If the pillar is the same, why does every book describe it differently? Once you have the answer, you can assemble your own Day Pillar instead of memorising sixty entries.

The short answer: a position, not a type

The Day Pillar is the two characters that record the day you were born. The upper character is the Day Master, the lower one the Day Branch, and together they form one pair of the sexagenary cycle. That is why there are sixty of them.

Why the count is sixty falls outside this article — how ten stems and twelve branches produce sixty pairs is set out in the Stems and Branches guide. Here we only deal with how to read those sixty labels.

What the classical text actually says

Taking the day as the reference point is old practice. The Yuanhai Ziping states that the Ziping method takes the day as the master. Quote only that much and you get “your Day Pillar is you” — and a great many articles stop exactly there.

In other words, “do not judge from the Day Pillar alone” is not a modern disclaimer but the instruction in the source itself. Taking the day as the reference and settling the reading with the Day Pillar are entirely different acts. The first fixes a starting point; the second throws away six characters.

Which is why the tables disagree

A personality table is a summary of conclusions, not the procedure that produced them. One author weights the hidden stems of the branch, another leads with the twelve stages, a third distils the cases they have met with that pillar. Different bases, different summaries.

So when two tables clash, the useful question is not “which book is correct?” but “what is this description based on?” Once you know the basis, the two are usually not contradicting each other — they were reading different columns.

The Day Master — the character that stands for you

The Day Master is the reference point for the whole chart. Interpretation begins by comparing whether the other seven characters support it, drain it, or press on it. What distinguishes each of the ten Day Masters is covered separately in the ten Day Masters guide.

One thing is worth holding on to here: the same Day Master yields six different pillars. Yang Wood can be seated on Ja, In, Jin, O, Sin or Sul, and where it sits changes the conditions.

The Day Branch — the seat beneath

The Day Branch is the ground the Day Master stands on — traditionally called the seat below. The same Yang Wood reads differently seated on watery Ja than on wooden In.

That difference does not translate straight into a difference of character. Read it first as a structural difference: is there a root, is there support, is there drain? The scenes of a life need the other six characters and the luck cycles before anything can be said.

Hidden stems in the branch — is there a root?

A Day Branch is more than its surface character. One to three stems sit concealed inside it, and the one that carries the largest share is the main qi. The third column of the table below gives it for each branch.

A root does not come from the main qi alone. The Day Master has a root wherever its own element appears among the hidden stems — Yang Wood seated on Jin looks rootless if you read only the main qi (Yang Earth), yet the residual Yi Wood inside Jin gives it a wood root. Conversely, a main qi that generates the Day Master is not by itself a root. How the hidden stems divide is covered in the Hidden Stems guide, and how that root feeds into strength judgement continues in the Day Master strength guide.

Twelve stages — which phase the Day Master occupies

Pairing a Day Master with a branch fixes one of the twelve stages. Yang Wood seated on Ja gives Bath; Yang Fire seated on In gives Birth. The fourth column of the table below carries that value.

Some of the names sound alarming — Illness, Death, Tomb — but they are names for a phase of energy, not forecasts of events. What each of the twelve means is set out in the Twelve Stages guide.

Self-matching pillars — same element above and below

Among the sixty, some pillars share one element between Day Master and Day Branch. These are called self-matching pillars. Computed on the element-match rule there are twelve: Gapin, Eulmyo, Byeongo, Jeongsa, Mujin, Musul, Gichuk, Gimi, Gyeongsin, Sinyu, Imja and Gyehae.

Reading the Day Branch as the spouse position

It is common practice to assign the Day Branch to the spouse. The arrangement comes from its being the branch closest to the self, and it appears often when relationships are discussed.

This article, however, does not use it to predict a partner’s character or a marriage date. A relationship is not settled by one cell of a chart, and compatibility requires reading several axes across two charts.

The 60 Day Pillars as structure

The table below carries structural values instead of personality adjectives. The twelve-stage phase and the main hidden stem are taken directly from the functions this service uses to calculate charts, so they match what your own result screen shows and can be checked against it.

Six sentences for reading your own pillar

Once those six are filled in, the sentence changes from “I am such-and-such a pillar” to “my Day Master sits here, its root is there, and the month supports this side.” To read the whole chart from the beginning, start with the Saju introduction.

One sentence to keep

Find the two characters of your Day Pillar in your chart, then check them against the matching row above.

Find My Day Pillar

Sources and how the evidence was handled

The instruction to take the day as the master while first weighing the Month Command and forming the structure from the year, day and hour branches was read in the original Yuanhai Ziping passage. The twelve-stage phases and main hidden stems in the sixty-row table were produced by running the very functions and tables this service uses to calculate charts, and the twelve self-matching pillars were checked against the list handed down traditionally.

Three things are deliberately not claimed. First, where the circulating sixty-pillar personality tables were first assembled in their present form could not be established, so the article says neither that they are classical nor that they are not. Second, the spouse-position arrangement is described but not used to predict a partner’s character or a marriage date. Third, because lineages disagree on whether the four Earth pillars belong among the self-matching ones, the twelve computed on the element-match rule are given with that rule stated.

Classical lines are quoted and the explanations rewritten. This article does not use a Day Pillar to settle personality, career, compatibility, wealth or health, and does not rank pillars as good or bad. The sixty-row personality summary in the earlier version listed conclusions without any procedure behind them, and has been replaced by the structural table.