What work suits
your saju? 🧭

Of the eight characters in a saju chart, the upper character of your birth day, the day master, is “you.” The other seven characters are not good or bad in themselves; they are read by how they relate to you. Sorting those relationships into ten kinds gives the Ten Gods, and in Four Pillars astrology they are the first thing anyone looks at when the question is work and aptitude.

The relationships come from how the five elements feed and overcome one another. An element the same as yours is bi-geop, one you give birth to is sik-sang, one you overcome is jae-seong, one that overcomes you is gwan-seong, and one that gives birth to you is in-seong. Splitting each of these once more by whether the yin or yang matches makes ten: bi-geop is bigyeon and geopjae, sik-sang is siksin and sanggwan, jae-seong is pyeonjae and jeongjae, gwan-seong is pyeongwan and jeonggwan, and in-seong is pyeonin and jeongin.

Each of the five energies corresponds to a way of living. Bi-geop stands on its own strength, sik-sang makes things and sends them out, jae-seong handles and gathers, gwan-seong takes responsibility and sets rules, and in-seong learns and takes in. None is better than another; which one runs thickest is thought to change which places suit you.

The remaining five characters other than the day master (six if you enter a birth time) are each converted into a Ten God and added up, with a different weight for each position. The weights are month branch 2.2, day branch 1.7, month stem 1.4, year branch 1.1, year stem 0.9, hour branch 1.3. The month branch (the monthly command) — the earthly branch of the month you were born — weighs most because Four Pillars astrology measures the strength of a chart by the monthly command first.

The scores built up this way are grouped into the five energies and turned into percentages. If one energy goes over 68.5% of the total, you are “concentrated”; if even the strongest energy falls short of 32.0%, you are “balanced”; anywhere in between, the Ten God with the highest score becomes your type. That makes 10 + 2 = 12 types.

Weight the month branch any more heavily and that single character would account for over a third of the total on its own, so an evenly spread chart could never appear. Setting it at 2.2 gives the monthly command the most weight while still leaving room for the balanced type.

They use the same manse-ryeok engine but look at opposite places. The Joseon Dynasty Job Test decides your occupation from the day master alone: Gap Wood is a master carpenter, Eul Wood a physician, and so on, so the same day master means the same job. This test, the other way round, looks at every character except the day master. That is why people with the same day master can land on different types depending on the month and day they were born.

In fact, if you run both tests side by side over every date from 1960 to 2012, knowing one result tells you almost nothing about the other (the mutual information between the two results is 0.07 bits, against 3.58 bits if they overlapped completely). Even when you group people by day master, the most common type in each group stays under 19%, so the day master alone does not decide the result either. Try the Joseon test as well and put the two results side by side; they tell different stories.

It is the real distribution from computing every case: each of the 19,359 days from 1 January 1960 to 31 December 2012, multiplied by 13 birth-time options (unknown plus the 12 earthly-branch hours), for 251,667 combinations. The most common type comes out at 10.2% and the rarest, Digs Only One Well, at 5.9%, so all twelve types fall between 5.9% and 10.2%.

There is a reason the types differ. The day branch, the earthly branch of your birth day, is always set up to share the day master’s yin or yang (yang stems take yang branches and yin stems take yin branches, as in Gapja and Eulchuk), so geopjae, sanggwan, jeongjae, jeonggwan and jeongin can never appear in the day-branch position. That makes the five “pyeon” (偏) Ten Gods slightly more common than the five “jeong” (正) ones. The formula was not built that way; it is simply how the sixty-day cycle is put together.

There are no random numbers anywhere in the calculation. The table of solar-term transition times is fixed inside the page, and so are the weights used to count the Ten Gods. A tie-breaker is only needed when two or more Ten Gods have exactly the same score, and even then the order comes from a fixed hash of the birth date, so the same date always gives the same answer. Out of 251,667 cases, such ties happen in 2.0%, and in 1.6% the tie actually decides the type.

My birthday is on the lunar calendar — can I enter it as is?

No. Input is solar, meaning the Gregorian calendar. If you only know your lunar birthday, convert it to a solar date with the lunar–solar converter (in Korean) first. The manse-ryeok counts by solar terms — the sun’s actual position — not by lunar dates, so entering a lunar date as if it were solar gives a chart that is off by nearly a month.

Does not knowing my birth time change the result?

It can. Entering a time adds the hour branch with a weight of 1.3, which shifts the whole balance of the five energies. If you don’t choose a time, the calculation uses five characters only. A sixth character tends to even things out, so “concentrated” actually turns up more often when the time is unknown (6.5% against 5.8%). Not knowing the time doesn’t make the result less accurate; the five-character and six-character results are simply two different calculations.

My result is different from other manse-ryeok calculators

This test calculates with a single standard and no options. Birth time is taken only as one of the 12 two-hour earthly-branch periods, with the middle of each period standing in for it, and there are no school-specific settings such as the 30-minute standard-time correction or yajasi (whether a birth after 11 p.m. counts toward the next day’s pillar). The day pillar is set by the date alone, regardless of time. So if you were born around 11 p.m. or on the day a solar term begins, the result can differ from a traditional manse-ryeok. If you need a precise chart that accounts for these edge cases, use the manse-ryeok tool (in Korean): it reflects solar-term transitions to the minute, and lets you switch the standard-time correction and yajasi on and off.

The result doesn’t match my actual job

That can happen. This screen measures one thing only — which energy runs thickest — and what a person ends up doing for a living is decided by far more than a saju chart. Even in Four Pillars astrology, the Ten Gods are read less as “you will have this job” and more as “you are someone who moves in this way.” The jobs listed are examples of places where that energy is put to good use, not right answers.

Does the result link contain my birth date?

No. The only thing in a share link is a single number packing together your type, your day master, and four of the five energy percentages. Your birth date and birth time are not in it and cannot be worked out from it.

Why are there only 12 types?

Because there are ten Ten Gods. Add “concentrated,” where one side dominates, and “balanced,” where none stands out, and you get twelve. Within each type, though, the five energy percentages combine with ten possible day masters, so even people with the same type see a different result screen.

If you have read this far you will have guessed: this test is for entertainment. The manse-ryeok part is a real calculation running on actual solar-term data, and the way it counts the Ten Gods follows the framework used in Four Pillars astrology. But the weight given to each character, the thresholds for concentrated and balanced, and the readings that turn the Ten Gods into modern jobs were all set by this page at its own discretion. Four Pillars astrology has no scale like “energy concentration %.”

If you are seriously weighing your career path, don’t decide on this screen alone. If you have become curious about saju itself, look up your own eight characters with the manse-ryeok tool (in Korean), and what those characters mean can be explored at Yaong Myeongni (in Korean).

This English page was translated from the Korean page by AI (Claude).