What is Bazi ?

Bazi comes in different names; the most common used names are Eight Characters (八字) , Four-Pillars (四柱), and Zi Ping (子平). Bazi is based on one's birth date and time to help determine the possible fate of the person. The birth date/time is first translated into chinese calendar representation which can be described by 4 pillars, where each pillar represents YEAR, MONTH, DAY and HOUR, with each pillar contains 2 Chinese characters (therefore a total of eight characters) , hence the naming of Eight Characters.

Bazi had long been used and practiced, but in Sung Dynasty, Xu Zi Ping,  set the standard in using Bazi as the fortune telling tool.

There are 'two' main bazi fortune telling methods: (a) 神煞 and (b) 十神生剋制化. Xu's theory is based on (b) but many practitioners used (a) instead as it is much easier to use, but (b) is both much richer in its theoretical base as well as its application.

One should note that bazi only uses the birth time for fortune telling, but it does not include where the person is born and who this person's relationship, which also contributes a large portion to one's destiny. So bazi can only gives an indicator of a possible prediction. This is critical as many people think bazi or any fortune telling tool can be used to predict with 100% accuracy, I will leave this to you to have a thought about it.

The other analogy of Bazi is DNA: with the advance of genealogy, it is now possible to predict one's health condition and possibilites of getting certain diseases. Genealogy doesn't say one WILL certainly get some diseases but only suggests that one may be more susceptible. Bazi is similar whereby it can be used as a guide to what may happen to one's fate.

Time is important!

Now that you have some basic understand what bazi is, it is your turn to translate your birth date into chinese birthdate. There are many websites that do that on the internet, so there is no need to cover here. (Not all sites are created equal and there are often mis-calculations). Before getting the real birth date/time,  there are two other elements which you should be aware of, which affect the `real` birth date:

- Daylight saving time (DST)

many countries observe daylight saving time, while some countries don't. Depending on when/where you were born, the actual birth time needs to take DST into consideration.

- Apparent (True) solar time  真太陽時

Our normal day/time is currently based on Mean-solar time for ease of measurement, but for more accurate measurement, the mean solar time needed to be converted to apparent solar time. You can find the appropriate adjustments of your birth location from most of you country's observatory websites. 

In summary, in order to get to the `real` birth date/time, make sure you take care of the above time adjustments.

What can Bazi tell ?

Although Bazi cannot be used to predict with 100% accuracy, there are cases where Bazi are particular good for:

- which period is good ? which period is bad ? (periods are usually defined in 10 years, 1 year, 1 month)

- when will I meet my other half ?

- how is your career ?

- would you get rich ? 

There are other questions which Bazi is used to answer as well such as:

- how many children will  I have ?

- what will be my partner's age ?

- how rich would I get ?

Although there are mechanisms to try to answer the second part of the questions, from my own experience, there doesn't seem to have satisfactory answer.

Nevertheless, with Bazi answering the first set of the questions , one can be more prepared if an adverse condition is coming or knowing luck on his side.