Your past life

What picks this story — the heavenly stem of your birth year

Your past life is chosen by one character: the heavenly stem (天干) of the year you were born. The 10 stems are the 5 elements paired up, one yang and one yin each — that is why every story answers to two of the characters. The animal walking beside you comes from that same year's earthly branch (地支).

The Saju year does not turn on 1 January. It turns at Lichun (立春), the start of spring, in early February. So if you were born in January or the first days of February, you carry the previous year's stem — and your animal may differ from the one the calendar gives you. This screen never asks for your birth time, so the day Lichun falls on still counts as the old year.

Yang and yin are computed, but this screen does not use them to pick the story; the column is here to show why the characters come in pairs while the lives do not. We do not ask for your birth time or your sex either. The year you were born is the only thing this screen reads.

Because the story comes from an element and the animal comes from a branch, this screen holds 5 stories and 12 animals, and the stem-branch calendar pairs them into exactly 60 combinations — one for each year of the sexagenary cycle. That cycle closes and begins again every 60 years, so a person born 60 years before you, or 60 years after, opens this page and reads the very same story beside the very same animal. Nothing here is unique to you; what is yours is the year you arrived in.

The year is the whole of the input. Once the Saju year is settled, no month and no day inside that year changes a word of the answer: someone born in March and someone born the following December read the same page, provided both fall after the turn of spring. This screen never asks for your birth time, your sex, or the place you were born, and it does not store what it is not asked.

The animal walking beside you is the branch of that same year, and its name follows the zodiac of the language you are reading rather than a single translated list. The fourth branch is a rabbit in most of these languages but a cat in Vietnamese; the second is an ox in some and a water buffalo in others. The branch does not change — only the creature that tradition puts in that seat.

This is a mirror, not a forecast. It does not say what will happen to you, and it does not read luck, fortune, or a date to act on; the tools that do that are elsewhere on this site. What you get here is one of 5 pictures the old elemental grammar draws, offered as something to think with.