(235) The way saju defines you
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By Janet Shin
Many people read their destiny by their birth years or the Chinese zodiac signs. This applies not only to Asians, but is a global interest. in Western culture, it is common to read one’s yearly and daily fortune based on the zodiac signs of one’s birth year. Such forecasts are seen in daily newspapers and the most-viewed sections on portal sites. I have also written daily columns of “Tomorrow’s fortune” for an evening paper.
The 12 zodiac signs are used in counseling the general public because it would be too complicated the other way round. Most people consider it to be the same as saju readings. However, saju uses a day stem as a representative energy of one’s destiny, which leads to much more sophisticated readings. First, the birth year can easily be figured, while the day master can’t. The latter can only be verified when we confirm with the 10,000 year calendar, called the "manseryeok" in Korean. It is not so incredibly complicated though. Owing to the rapid propagation of the Internet nowadays, you can easily get any saju reading just by keying your birth records to a computer program.
Saju consists of the four pillars of our birth year, month, date and hour. Each pillar is a combination of a heavenly stem and earthly branch, so they make eight letters in total. The birth year is one. For non-practitioners, that may still be an enumeration of a cipher, but once you learn how to translate the data, you can get lots of information ― one’s personality and relationships with other letters, which are characterized as friends, expressions, money, career and knowledge.
During the early days of saju study, scholars naturally focused on the birth years. They were portrayed as animals and symbolized nobility (year of the rat), hardship (cow), authority (tiger), turmoil (rabbit), ingenuity (dragon), literature (snake), fortune (horse), wanderings (sheep), solitude (monkey), perseverance (chicken), art (dog) and longevity (pig). On top of that, people added numbers of year, month, date and hour in order to read destiny in phases. Gods and devils to influence people’s lives either fortunately or unfortunately were determined by the birth years as well. Due to the fact that the birth years, with implications from animal signs, have a totemism background and mythical perceptions, the initial saju theory mingled with many other folk beliefs and became superstition.
As time passed, sincere scholars kept searching for profound truth and learned it was more accurate to read by the day stem. By introducing the concept of day master, they were able to apprehend the mutual generation and restriction relationships among five elements more systematically, and apply them to various facets of life.
While birth years fall into 12 characters, there are 10 types in day stems. They are materialized in a way, but imply more of a qi element than the objects themselves. For example, if one is born with a byeong fire day master, he or she has a distinct personality to be bright and cheerful. They shed light on others and can’t focus on one place. Jeong (yin) fire, on the other hand, keeps its passion inside. People with a jeong day master play for their own sake while caring for others at the same time. We can tell that jeong people are more practical than byeong.
A proper application of day master analysis makes saju reasonable and logical so it became a study of academic spheres.
Information: Are you interested in learning more about the ancient Chinese teaching about the “Four Pillars of Destiny”? For further information, visit Janet’s website at www.fourpillarskorea.com, contact her at 010-5414-7461 or email janetshin@hotmail.com.
The writer is the author of “Life’s Secrets.”