墨Saju Ink
← Saju Ink

자미두수 · Zi Wei Dou Shu · Purple Star

If Saju is a map of time,this one is a floor plan.

The same birth moment, read a completely different way. Saju gives you eight characters and asks what you are made of. Zi Wei Dou Shu builds a board of twelve rooms — one for love, one for money, one for work, one for the body — and places a cast of stars across them. You read it by walking the rooms, not by following a line.

It is the older sibling of the two systems in reputation and the more literal in structure: less about what you are, more about where in a life the weight falls.

宮Twelve palaces
One for each department of a life: self, partnership, money, work, home, health, movement, elders. The board is fixed; what changes is which stars land where.
星Fourteen major stars
Each with a temperament and a brightness — the same star can sit at Temple or Fallen, working with the grain or against it. Nothing is read from one star alone.
化Four transformations
Your birth year fires four charges into the board: Fortune, Power, Repute, Friction. Where each lands tells you which department is supplied and which one snags.

Both fields are required and neither can be guessed. The Self palace is placed from the birth hour; the ten-year decades run forward or backward depending on sex paired with the polarity of the birth year. The method takes only two values here — if the question doesn't fit you, use what was recorded at birth and read the decades as one possible ordering.

Free. No account, nothing stored.

How to read the board

  1. 01

    Never one star

    A palace is the sum of its major stars, their brightness, the support stars beside them, and any transformation landing on them. One star name is a fragment.

  2. 02

    Always four palaces

    No room is read alone. Each is read with the room opposite and the two in trine with it — the three-harmony set. That is where the actual reading happens.

  3. 03

    Empty rooms borrow

    A palace with no major star is read through the one opposite. It is not the same as that palace, though: an empty room is more porous, shaped more by circumstance.