No Birth Time? What a Six-Character Chart Still Shows

No Birth Time? What a Six-Character Chart Still Shows

Many people know their birthday but not the hour. You can still get a saju reading. Our free calculator reads your chart from the year, month and day, and leaves the hour out. This guide shows how, and which parts of your result stay steady.

What "six characters" means

A full saju chart has four pillars, and each pillar has two characters, so eight in all. The year, month and day pillars come from your birth date. Only the hour pillar always needs the time you were born. A few other details can depend on it too, as the sections below show.

Without a birth time we cannot set the hour pillar, so we read the six characters that remain. New to pillars? The Four Pillars shows how each one is built, including the hour pillar and its two-hour blocks.

How to ask for it

  1. Open the free Saju calculator.
  2. Choose your birth date.
  3. Next to Birth time, tick the Unknown box. The hour and minute menus switch off.
  4. Calculate.

In your result, the hour pillar shows a dash and the word "unknown" instead of two characters. For the other pillars, we use noon as a stand-in time.

Two things change quietly. The birthplace sun-time adjustment has no clock time to work on, so it is skipped, and the question about births between 11:00 and 11:59 PM does not appear.

What stays the same

Your Day Master. Your Day Master comes from your birth date in almost every case. The type shown is the one for the date you entered, with noon as the stand-in time.

There is one honest exception. Our Saju Reading page notes that a type changes only if the birth time falls close to midnight. If your family remembers a very late night or a just-after-midnight birth, say so to whoever reads your chart, because the exact minute could move the day.

Most year and month pillars. These follow the sun's calendar, not the clock, so the hour matters only on the day a solar term begins (see below).

What gets less precise

Birthdays on a solar-term day. A saju month does not start on the 1st. It starts when a solar term begins, and on that day the time of day decides which side of the line you fall on. For Ipchun, around February 4, the year can change too.

When your birthday is a solar-term day and the time is unknown, the calculator shows both results: one for a birth before the term and one for a birth after it. Read both.

Ten-year cycles. Our calculator works out the starting age of each cycle from your birth moment, so without a time it is less precise. Treat the ages as approximate.

Element counts and strength. The five-elements count and the strength reading use the characters we have, six instead of eight. A count made from six characters can show a little less of some element only because two slots are empty. That is not a sign that something is missing in you.

Our strength score sorts a chart into Strong self-energy, Balanced or Leans on support, and no group is better or worse. With six characters it is a rougher guide.

Reports. The longer reading adds a short note: your big picture is here even without the hour, and if you learn it later, one more piece fills in.

How to read a six-character chart

  1. Start with your Day Master. It does not depend on the hour in most cases, and it is the character the rest of the chart is read around.
  2. Look at balance, lightly. Ask which elements show up often and which are quiet. The hour pillar might add to either.
  3. Hold timing loosely. Treat the ten-year cycles as rough chapters.
  4. Keep what fits. A reading is a mirror, not a verdict.

A six-character reading is a little less detailed, the way a sketch holds less than a photograph. It is still a useful way to look at your chart.

Should I guess a time?

We suggest not. Each hour pillar covers a two-hour block, and a wrong guess gives a confident-looking pair of characters that may not be yours. Block edges also shift with where you were born, because we convert clock time to sun time first. In Seoul that is usually about 32 minutes earlier than the clock. Between March 1954 and August 1961, when Korea's clocks ran on UTC+8:30, it is only about 2 minutes, or about 62 in the summers that used daylight saving time. During daylight saving time in 1948–1951 and in May–October 1987 and 1988, it is about 92 minutes. So a time near a block's edge is easy to get wrong.

If you want the real answer, try these:

  • A hospital record or a birth certificate, where it lists the time
  • A baby book or family photo album
  • A parent, grandparent or relative who remembers

If you learn it later, run the calculator again with the time filled in. In most cases only the hour pillar is added. Pillars near a solar term or near midnight are the ones that might also change.

Is a six-character chart "less accurate"?

It is less detailed. The characters it shows follow the same rules as a full chart, with the noon stand-in and the solar-term and midnight cases described above. How We Calculate has a short section on births without a time, and the Bond Circle form has the same Unknown option for friends.

Where to go next

  1. Try it now in the free Saju calculator.
  2. Learn how each pillar is built in The Four Pillars.
  3. Start from the beginning with What Is Saju?.
  4. See a full chart explained on the Saju Reading page.

Read next

For entertainment purposes only. Not medical, legal, financial or psychological advice. Read the full Disclaimer. Questions? Visit our Contact page.

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