What this is
Lumen BaZi is a small independent site, built and run by one person rather than a studio or a brand. It exists to make two classical Chinese systems — the Four Pillars (BaZi) and Purple Star Astrology (Zi Wei Dou Shu) — usable by people who read English and have never studied Chinese.
The site is written in the first person by one practitioner, whose name is not used here deliberately: the work should stand on its checks, not on a title. There is no organisation behind it, no religious affiliation, no lineage claim and no guru.
Why it exists
The English-language gap in this field is specific. Most BaZi material is either written in Chinese, translated badly enough to lose the technical terms, or produced by calculators that hand you a chart and stop — eight characters, no explanation. The reading material that does exist often sells through fear: a curse to remove, a bad year to pay to avoid.
This site takes the opposite route. Every term is explained where it appears: what a Heavenly Stem is, why the Day Master is the reference point, what “Indirect Resource” is meant to describe, why a month begins at a solar term and not on the 1st. If a word appears on a page, the page also tells you what it means.
How the numbers are produced
Nothing on this site is hand-typed or “estimated”. Charts come from open-source engines named on the licences page: bazi-engine 0.9.0 (MIT) for the Four Pillars, plus lunar-javascript for the calendar layer and iztro for Zi Wei Dou Shu. Solar terms, true solar time, and the year boundary at the start of spring are all handled by those engines, not by a setting chosen to look flattering.
Each chart result prints the calculation version (bazi-luck-compatibility-v0.9.0) under its technical details, and the licences page lists the engine version and its terms. The same birth details produce the same chart today and in five years, and anyone can reproduce the output with the same engine version. When the engine changes, the version changes with it.
What this site does not claim
- Not science. These are traditional systems with internal rules, not measured effects. They are worth studying as culture and as a vocabulary for reflection — not as evidence.
- Not prediction. No page here tells you what will happen. A chart is a lens, not a prescription.
- Not advice. Nothing here replaces medical, legal, financial or relationship professionals. If a reading worries you, that is a reason to talk to a person qualified in the actual domain.
- No fear-selling. There is no curse to remove, no “bad luck” package, no urgency timer. If a site in this niche pressures you, close it.
The paid reading
The optional reading is written by a human, not generated by software, and it is the only paid thing on the site. It exists because a chart is legible once someone walks you through it, and not before. It costs $19.88, is delivered by email within 12 hours of payment, and covers the chart you actually calculated — not a generic report.
What you are buying, and what that means for refunds. This is written work made to order, not a product you can send back. The fee buys the hours of attention behind the reading, and those hours are spent before the file reaches you — so once the reading has been sent, it is not refundable. Ordering is the instruction to start writing straight away, which is what makes same-day delivery possible.
What is guaranteed instead is the work. If a passage is unclear, or a detail about your chart is wrong, reply to that email within seven days and it will be rewritten once, free, with no argument about whose fault it was. That is the honest version of a guarantee for this kind of service: you are paying for the effort, and the effort gets corrected until it holds up.
Your birth details are used for that reading only: never sold, never added to a marketing list, never used to produce anything else.
Contact
Questions about how a chart was calculated, corrections, licensing, or a deletion request — write to . Corrections are welcome and get published: the site is more useful when the error is named than when it is quietly patched.