Method

Charts disagree for reasons that are knowable. These pages set out the conventions Meridian uses, with worked examples you can check against any other calculator.

• Why do two BaZi calculators give you different charts?Four things cause almost every disagreement: true solar time, the day boundary, historical daylight saving, and what happens when the birth time is unknown. A worked example of each.
• Should a BaZi chart use clock time or true solar time?True solar time, if you want the hour pillar to mean what the tradition intended. Clock time is a modern administrative convenience. The gap reaches over an hour in parts of Asia.
• Born overseas: which time does your chart use?The time where you were born, corrected to true solar time for that longitude. Not your parents' home time, not Beijing time, and not the time zone you live in now.
• How does Zi Wei Dou Shu handle a leap month?A leap month is split. Births in the first half count as the month itself, births from the sixteenth day count as the following month. Two weeks apart, a different life palace.
• What is a Day Master, and is a weak one bad?The Day Master is the stem of your day pillar, the character a BaZi reading treats as you. Strength describes how supported it is by the rest of the chart. Weak is not bad.
• The Ten Gods in plain EnglishThe Ten Gods are not deities. They are the ten possible relationships between your Day Master and every other character in your chart. Once you see the pattern, the naming stops being mysterious.
• Does the BaZi day start at 23:00 or at midnight?The 子 hour straddles midnight, so schools disagree on where the day changes. A birth at 23:30 gets a different day pillar depending on the rule. Here is the difference, computed.
• Does daylight saving change your hour pillar?Yes, when it applied at your birth and the calculator ignores it. One hour of clock error moves the hour pillar by one branch. Hong Kong used summer time until 1979.
• Can you cast a BaZi chart without a birth time?Yes, for three of the four pillars. The hour pillar cannot be derived without a time, and a calculator that returns one anyway has defaulted to noon without telling you.
• The eight methods Meridian reads, and how to choose oneBaZi, Zi Wei Dou Shu, Vedic, Western, Human Design, numerology, Qi Men Dun Jia and Da Liu Ren. What each is actually for, what the Meridian Method adds, and why more methods is not the same as a better answer.
• How Meridian casts a chartThe conventions, the sources and the tests. Eight deterministic engines checked against published references, true solar time by default, and a stated rule for every case where traditions differ.
• Can you trust AI with your metaphysics?Only if the maths never touches the model. The split between deterministic calculation and language, why a general chatbot fails at both, and what a harness has to do.
• Will an AI reading replace a human master?No. What it does instead is lower the floor, so a careful, grounded reading is available to anyone at any hour, and a master is where you go when the question deserves one.

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