Where each reading comes from
Picture a kitchen drawer full of recipes. Some you weighed on a scale: two cups of flour, exactly. Some come from your grandmother: "a pinch of salt, until it looks right." And some are your own tweaks: "I use a little less sugar." All three are useful. But it helps to know which is which.
Pillars does the same with what it tells you. Next to many readings there's a small label that says where it comes from. There are five.
From your chart
This is calculation. Your pillars, the solar terms, the dates of your 10-year cycles, how many characters of each element you have. Same date, time and place, same result, every time.
You'll see it on the pillar details in Chart, on Ten roles, under the next solar term on Today, and on calendar notes such as the moment a new month begins.
Calculation still rests on a few conventions, like when the day starts or whether we use the sun's time or the clock's. You can see and change them in Settings, under Calculation conventions, and read the whole method in "How we calculated it".
Traditional reading
This is what the Chinese tradition says about those characters. The image of your Day Master, the symbolic stars, the texts for each day. It comes from old books and the schools that grew around them, put into plain words.
Schools don't always agree. When that matters, the explanation says so: "Readings differ between schools; we show the one noted here."
App model
This one is ours. The tradition doesn't hand out a single score for a year or a month, so we built a model to show the ups and downs. You'll see it next to the little rating dots, with the words "More aligned", "Mixed" or "More demanding", and under the support gauge in Chart.
A model is a choice. It could have been built another way, and that's why we label it. When a chart comes out balanced, it uses the classical useful-element rule and tells you which one decided. When the birth hour isn't known well and the possible versions of the chart disagree, it rates with the most likely version and tells you so: "Based on the chart's most likely version".
You told us
These are things you entered yourself. On a person's screen, under "Events you shared", you can save the day you met or the day you married. In the calendar, that day then says "You told us".
The app doesn't check these or treat them as proof. It shows you how the BaZi calendar looked that day, as something to think about.
Imported, unverified
Earlier versions of the app let you add someone by typing in their pillars instead of a birth date. Those people still carry this label. The app shows their pillars just as they were given. It can't recalculate them, and without a birth date there's no timeline and no rating.
In the full reading
The pages of the Full reading, and the pages for pairs and groups, carry a pill at the top that says "Traditional interpretation". The whole text there is the tradition's view in plain words, so the pill sits once on the page instead of on every line.
The "Why?" link
Many readings have a Why? next to them. Tap it and you'll see the explanation in plain words, the rule behind it and its label. Nothing is hidden.
How to use them
- From your chart: a fact about the calendar.
- Traditional reading: an old voice, worth hearing, not the last word.
- App model: one opinion, ours.
- You told us: your own memory.
- Imported, unverified: someone else's numbers, taken as given.