How the reading works.

Before opening any reading, the first thing worth understanding is not a single rule of the art, but how the report itself is produced. The whole process runs in five stages: the first three, together with the 紫微 palace scores, are mathematics; Cho Shin Studio is responsible for the written interpretation and the 八字 domain scores:

The birth time first passes through a true solar time (真太陽時) correction, converting clock time into the moment that matches the sun’s actual position. The 八字 and 紫微 charts are then each cast under fixed rules — the 干支, the palaces, and the stars all laid out. These two steps are deterministic programs: given the same birth details, recalculating at any time yields exactly the same result. Only at the fourth step do we begin to interpret, translating the chart into written analysis within the frameworks of classical texts such as 窮通寶鑑, 滴天髓, and 子平真詮; the fifth step then converts everything into scores and a radar chart under the scoring rules.

One sentence here is worth keeping, and it is the first thing this guide wants to make plain: casting the chart is mathematics and comes out the same every time; the interpretation is text that Cho Shin Studio generates within the framework of the classics — the wording will differ from one run to the next, but the direction of the conclusions should hold steady. If you analyse the same 八字 twice and find the phrasing different, that is normal — the same thing can always be said in many ways. But if the two runs reach opposite conclusions (one saying wealth prospects are strong, the other weak), that is no longer a matter of wording: go back to the chart data itself — the 干支, the palaces, the star brightness, the 四化 — and see which version actually stands.

The "This year at a glance" strip and the "Action rhythm days" card belong to the blood-test kind as well - deterministic lookups: each day's stem and branch comes from the calendar formula and is matched against your chart (wealth stems, noble-person, wenchang and peach-blossom branches, and the branch that clashes your day branch). No interpretive text is involved, and a recalculation always agrees. It is a rhythm reference, not an almanac - nothing is forbidden on any date; some days simply carry a lower cost for that kind of move, and a slow day only means decisions carry more friction, not misfortune.

The hour pillar (時柱) of a 八字 chart does not read the number on your watch; it reads where the sun actually stood in the sky. Whether the sun had reached due south at the moment you were born — solar noon — is what decides which 地支 the hour pillar takes, not what the local clock happened to show.

The problem is this: everyone within a time zone shares one standard time, yet the sun does not reach due south at the same moment across different longitudes. Each degree of longitude shifts solar time by four minutes; on top of that, the earth’s orbit is an ellipse and its axis spins tilted, and together these produce the equation of time — a correction that drifts with the month and can open up another ten-odd minutes. Only after the longitude correction and the equation of time are added together do you have your true solar time. An hour branch in 八字 spans a two-hour window — ten-odd minutes rarely matter, but half an hour or a full hour is enough to push you across an hour boundary, and the whole hour pillar changes (the starting age of the Luck Pillars (大運) is computed on this site within the clock-time framework and is not affected by the true solar time correction).

八字 works with ten heavenly stems (天干: 甲乙丙丁戊己庚辛壬癸) and twelve earthly branches (地支: 子丑寅卯辰巳午未申酉戌亥) — yang stems pair with yang branches, yin with yin, cycling in order through sixty stem-branch combinations known as the 六十甲子. Your year, month, day, and hour of birth each correspond to one such pair; together they form the Four Pillars (四柱) and their eight characters (八字): four pillars, two characters each, eight characters in all.

Each pillar corresponds to a different stage of life, and to different people. The year pillar (年柱) speaks of ancestry and the wider world you were born into, and of childhood; the month pillar (月柱) of parents and upbringing, and of youth; the day pillar (日柱) of yourself and your spouse, and of middle age — the stem of the day pillar is the Day Master (日主), the protagonist of the whole chart, the reference point against which every other character is read; the hour pillar (時柱) speaks of children, and of the later years.

The Ten Gods (十神) sound like ten deities; they are nothing of the kind. The term is a naming scheme: take the Day Master (日主) — you — as the centre, and classify how every other stem and branch relates to it, first by the five-element cycle of generating and controlling, then by whether the yin-yang polarity matches. That yields ten relationships, each with a name of its own.

Hidden stems (藏干) extend the same logic: on the surface an earthly branch is a single character, yet inside it hides one to three heavenly stems, ranked by strength as principal qi (本氣), middle qi (中氣), and residual qi (餘氣) — the principal carries the most weight, the residual the least.

Which element does this chart most need? That is the most central question in 八字 analysis, and its answer is called the favorable and core elements (喜用神). Yet classical practice reaches that answer by three different paths, each starting from an entirely different premise:

調候 (climatic adjustment, from 窮通寶鑑) reads the heat, cold, dryness and damp of the birth month — whatever climate the chart lacks, it supplies. This is the weather view.

木生於春，餘寒猶存。喜火溫暖，則無盤屈之患；藉水資扶，而有舒暢之美。—— 窮通寶鑑《論木》

旺衰 (strength assessment, from 滴天髓) reads how strong or weak the Day Master (日主) itself stands — support it when weak, let it flow outward when strong. This is the stamina view.

能知衰旺之真機，其於立命之奧，思過半矣。—— 滴天髓

格局 (the structural approach, from 子平真詮) reads which Ten God (十神) comes through from the month command (月令) and what structure the chart thereby forms — the position view: it asks where you stand in the organisational chart of the whole reading, and how to work with that position rather than against it.

八字用神，專求月令，以日干配月令地支，而生剋不同，格局分焉。—— 子平真詮《論用神》

Three views of the same chart can reach different conclusions — that is not the system failing; the discipline has always carried three parallel lines of reasoning. A good analysis does not sidestep the divergence: it states plainly which path it took, and why that one.

Luck Pillars (大運) are the long-term trend, shifting once every ten years, counted forward or backward from the month pillar (月柱). The direction depends on sex combined with the yin-yang polarity of the birth year’s stem: men born in yang years and women born in yin years count forward; men born in yin years and women born in yang years count backward. The exact starting age is found by counting to the nearest 節 after the birth date when going forward, or to the nearest 節 before it when going backward (a 節, not a 氣 — the twelve 節 among the twenty-four solar terms, such as 立春 and 驚蟄) — then dividing the number of days by three. There is no ornate theory behind the conversion; it is purely an exchange of days for years.

The annual years (流年) are simply the 干支 of each year in turn, and the boundary where one year hands over to the next is 立春 — not January 1, and not the Lunar New Year either. This is the point people meeting 八字 for the first time most often get wrong.

Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗數) divides a life into twelve domains, the twelve palaces (十二宮): 命宮, 兄弟宮, 夫妻宮, 子女宮, 財帛宮, 疾厄宮, 遷移宮, 僕役宮 (also called 交友宮), 官祿宮, 田宅宮, 福德宮, and 父母宮. The position of 命宮 is fixed by the month and hour of birth; the other eleven palaces then wheel around the chart in a fixed order.

Each palace houses some of the fourteen major stars — 紫微, 天機, 太陽, 武曲, 天同, 廉貞, 天府, 太陰, 貪狼, 巨門, 天相, 天梁, 七殺, 破軍. A star’s condition in a given palace is graded on seven levels, from best to worst: 廟, 旺, 得, 利, 平, 不, 陷. Beyond that, the stem of the birth year attaches the 四化 to certain stars — four marks, 祿, 權, 科, 忌, each a gift or a lesson, of which 忌 is the one that asks the most attention.

To judge any domain, never read its palace in isolation: read the 三方四正 — the palace itself (本宮), the opposite palace (對宮, the one directly across), and the two other palaces of its trine (三合) — four palaces read together make the complete judgment.

The scores on the page are not a computed verdict on fate; they are chart features translated into numbers under a fixed set of adding-and-subtracting rules. The 紫微 palace scores start from a baseline of 60, with the program adjusting item by item for star brightness, the 四化, and auspicious or adverse stars; the 八字 domain scores are given item by item by Cho Shin Studio under the same 30–98 scale and scoring principles, each with its reasons attached. Both are locked to the range of 30 to 98 — a deliberate design, not a lazy algorithm: in this art there is no absolute full mark, for even the finest chart keeps something in reserve; and no absolute zero, for even the hardest chart leaves room to turn. When the page shows 65/100, the denominator is only a fixed ruler — the range that actually occurs is 30–98.

The two polygons on the radar chart are the separate views of the two systems — 八字 and 紫微. They score by different logic over different data, and they were never obliged to coincide. Where the two lines pull far apart on some domain, that is not an error; it is precisely the place most worth a closer look — the two systems have seen different things there.

As of August 2026, the compatibility reading no longer outputs an overall "NN-point" score (a change adopted from an external professional review). The reason is simple: treating harmonies as plus points and clashes as minus points, then summing, erases the real structure where pull and friction coexist — the branches 巳 and 申, for example, form a six-harmony and a punishment and a break, all genuinely present, yet all invisible once netted into one number. The new relationship tendency profile covers five facets; in each, the harmonizing force and the tension are accumulated on separate tracks and never subtracted, yielding a level (high / mid-high / mid / mid-low / needs observation) with its evidence listed item by item.

The five facets are read independently and are never summed into a total. When one structure bears on several facets at once, that is the same force projected onto different axes, not double counting. The report shows only the strength of a force and its level, never decimals — the finer values stay in the internal audit record so any conclusion can be traced back later. "Needs observation" fires in three cases: tension runs to the strong side, pull and friction are of comparable force, or birth-hour data is insufficient. All three mean "this is too forceful to summarize in one word," never "incompatible."

The personal reading works the same way: strength and favorable-element calls are made by the engine first, and this studio only writes them up readably. Timeliness ("in season?") and force ("actually strong?") are reported as two separate axes, so combinations like "in season yet not strong" appear explicitly. The band thresholds are provisional working values, not yet calibrated against classical case corpora — the band edges may shift later; the axes and the evidence lists will not. Favorable elements follow support-vs-restraint first, with climate adjustment taking priority only where the Qiong Tong Bao Jian text explicitly mandates it, and remedy/mediation logic in support; and an element missing from the chart is not thereby a favorable one — the report says outright which gaps need no filling.

The spouse star in romantic readings: the primary call always follows mainstream Zi Ping practice — Wealth for the wife in a man’s chart, Officer/Seven Killings for the husband in a woman’s — and that chain is run in full whatever the chart looks like. Where a woman’s chart also meets a substitution condition from the women’s chapter of the Di Tian Sui Chan Wei (for instance, when the officer is overwhelming with no peer stems, the seal stands for the husband), the studio runs the chain a second time under that school and shows both side by side; it never replaces the primary call. Different lineages read the same chart differently — that is the honest state of this art, so you get both rather than our pick of one. The verdict runs a multi-step chain — identify the star → present? → exposed or hidden → in season → rooted → clashed or merged → the Spousal Palace → a three-dimensional verdict — and one-step inferences like "star present = good marriage" are never used. Where evidence runs short, the honest output is "undetermined."

The known limits are stated too: (1) formal chart-pattern (格局) analysis is not modelled — only the follow-weak and follow-strong gates plus a transformation-pattern candidate flag exist, and charts flagged as candidates or near a gate boundary have their favorable-element conclusions automatically downgraded to “needs observation” wording; (2) combinations and clashes do not enter the strength reading — it counts static force only (season, hidden stems, exposed stems), while their dynamic effects go to the tendency model; every “combination” is judged as an interaction that exists, never as a completed transformation.

Treat this analysis as a mirror for self-awareness, not a script of what must happen. A low score in a domain means this is a place worth more of your care — not a place doomed to go badly. In the whole of the tradition, no chart has ever been all good or all bad.

Listing honestly where the error might come from is more useful than pretending the system is infallible: if the birth hour is uncertain, only six characters can be cast, and no 紫微 chart at all; if the moment of birth falls within 24 hours of a solar-term boundary, the chart is flagged for an ambiguous month pillar (possibly the year pillar as well), with a suggestion to re-verify the exact birth time; whether daylight saving time was in force at the birthplace in a given year can itself be hard to establish; and different classical schools can rule differently on the very same chart — this site follows one defensible path among them, which does not make it the only correct answer.