BaZi — Four Pillars
The only layer that is not planetary at all. The Chinese system reads a birth moment as four pairs of elements — year, month, day and hour — and asks how they balance. Because it shares no machinery with the other seven, when it agrees with them the agreement means something.
What it measures
Four pillars, each a Heavenly Stem over an Earthly Branch. The year pillar turns at Lì Chūn, the solar term in early February — not at Chinese New Year, which is a common and consequential error. The month pillar follows the solar terms, the day pillar comes from an unbroken sexagenary count, and the hour pillar is computed in true solar time, corrected for your longitude rather than your clock.
What it contributes that nothing else does
Elemental balance. BaZi asks what your chart has too much and too little of — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — and what a life needs to bring itself back into proportion. That is a question no Western or Vedic chart poses in those terms.
It has its own timing system too, the ten-year luck pillars, which we compare directly against the Vimshottari dasha. Two independent traditions, two clocks, built on entirely different reasoning. Where they mark the same year, that is worth knowing.
Its limit
The whole reading rests on the day pillar being correctly anchored. A cycle off by one day invalidates everything downstream, and errors of this kind are common in free online calculators. Ours is hard-coded from a reliable source and verified against a canonical control chart before any client work — the same standard we apply to the ephemeris.
What we need from you
Date and place are essential. Three of the four pillars are computable without a birth time; the hour pillar is not, and it is the one that speaks about children, later life and how you finish things. Missing it costs you a quarter of the reading, and we will say so rather than filling the gap.
BaZi alone: €38. All eight systems, cross-read: €108.
BaZi is the layer that gains most from the crossing, precisely because it argues from independent grounds. Read alone it is a complete system; read against the other seven it becomes a check on them.