Stems and branches

Every pillar in your chart has two characters. The upper one is a heavenly stem; the lower one is an earthly branch. There are ten stems and twelve branches, and that is the entire alphabet.

The ten stems

The stems are the five elements — Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water — each appearing twice, once in a yang form and once in a yin form. Yang Wood and Yin Wood are both Wood, but they behave like a tree and a vine respectively: same material, opposite strategy.

Stems are the visible part of a chart. What sits in a stem is what other people see in you and what you can reach for deliberately.

The twelve branches

The branches are the twelve you already half-know: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit and so on. In Saju they are not really animals — the animals are a mnemonic layered on later. They are twelve divisions that measure the year into months, the day into two-hour blocks, and the long cycle into positions.

Branches are denser and slower than stems. They are what is underneath, and what takes time to move.

Hidden stems: the part people skip

Every branch conceals one to three stems inside it. A branch is not one value; it is a small compartment with contents.

This matters practically. A chart can look short of Fire on the surface and contain a great deal of it hidden inside branches. Any element count that ignores hidden stems will describe a person who does not exist.

It also matters in the other direction: hidden stems act more weakly than stems standing in the open, and the third one in a branch is barely felt at all. Counting them as equal is the most common way a free calculator produces a chart that feels wrong.

Sixty, not a hundred and twenty

Stems and branches pair off in step, one to one. Because ten and twelve share a common factor, they do not produce every possible combination — they produce sixty, and then the sequence repeats.

That sixty-unit cycle is the engine of the whole system. It is also why a sixtieth birthday is a landmark in Korea: it is the first time the year of your birth comes round again.