📜 Myeongri basics
10 entries · fortune encyclopedia
The smallest possible glossary for enjoying your reading more. Knowing just these makes the whole chart page read far more clearly.
What are the Four Pillars?
Four pillars, eight characters
Stand the year, month, day and hour of your birth up as four pillars, and give each pillar one character from the sky (a Heavenly Stem) and one from the earth (an Earthly Branch), and you have eight characters. Reading the temperament and the flow of a life from how the Five Elements combine across those eight is what Myeongri does.
Stems and branches
Ten characters from the sky, twelve from the earth
The ten Heavenly Stems — Gap, Eul, Byeong, Jeong, Mu, Gi, Gyeong, Sin, Im, Gye — carry the energy of the sky; the twelve Earthly Branches — Ja, Chuk, In, Myo, Jin, Sa, O, Mi, Sin, Yu, Sul, Hae — carry the energy of the earth. Attach twelve animals to those twelve branches and you have the zodiac everybody knows.
How the elements feed and govern
Wood → Fire → Earth → Metal → Water, a cycle of feeding and overcoming
Wood feeds fire, fire feeds earth, earth feeds metal, metal feeds water, and water feeds wood — that is the feeding cycle. Wood overcomes earth, earth overcomes water, water overcomes fire, fire overcomes metal, and metal overcomes wood — that is the governing cycle. A good chart is not one with a lot of any single element; it is one where this cycle turns properly.
The Day Master — the protagonist
The sky character of the day you were born is “you”
The Heavenly Stem of your birth day is called the Day Master, and it is the reference point for the whole reading. All seven remaining characters are read through their relationship to it. The character types on this site — “the midday sun”, and so on — are the ten Day Masters unpacked.
The Ten Gods — the name tags for relationships
Friend, Rival, Eating God, Hurting Officer, Indirect and Direct Wealth, Seven Killings, Direct Officer, Indirect and Direct Resource
These are the ten names given to how another character relates to your Day Master by element and polarity. Energy like yours (Friend, Rival), energy you produce (Eating God, Hurting Officer), wealth you govern (Indirect and Direct Wealth), the rules that govern you (Seven Killings, Direct Officer), and the support that raises you (Indirect and Direct Resource). If your year is “a Direct Officer year”, it means a flow of honour and recognition.
The sixty-year cycle
10 from the sky × 12 from the earth = a great wheel of 60 years
Pair the ten stems with the twelve branches in order and you get sixty combinations: Gapja, Eulchuk, Byeongin and so on. It takes sixty years for the pair you were born under to come round again — which is why the sixty-first birthday is celebrated as the year the cycle returns.
The Saju new year begins at Ipchun
The year turns at the start of spring, around 4 February — not on 1 January
Myeongri runs on a solar-term calendar. The year pillar turns at Ipchun and the month pillar turns at each month’s solar term. So anyone born in January or early February may find their zodiac animal and year pillar differ from the calendar year. This site calculates on the Ipchun basis too.
Luck Pillars — the ten-year current
If the chart is the eight characters, the Luck Pillar is the road they walk
The eight characters you were born with never change, but the Luck Pillar turning every ten years warms and cools them differently. There is a well-known comparison: the chart is the car and the Luck Pillar is the road. The same car drives very differently on a motorway and on gravel.
The story of Tojeong Bigyeol
Yi Ji-ham, the eccentric scholar, and the 144 hexagrams
Tojeong Bigyeol is a new-year fortune book named after Tojeong Yi Ji-ham, a scholar of the mid-Joseon period. Your age and birth month and day give three numbers — upper, middle and lower — which produce one of 144 hexagrams, and the year’s overall fortune and its month-by-month flow are then read as verse. Families sitting down together to read it at new year was a long-standing custom.
When your zodiac animal changes
Anyone born in January or February may have a different animal
The zodiac animal also turns at Ipchun (or, in some schools, at the winter solstice) rather than on 1 January. Someone born in January 2026, for instance, is on the calendar in 2026 but before Ipchun, and so belongs to the previous year, the Eul-sa snake year. If your animal came out differently from what you expected, this is why.