Chart Patterns
格局 · Reading the Month Command
After strength, the second question a serious reader asks is pattern (格局, gé jú): what takes command of this chart? The traditional answer looks first at the Month Pillar — the season you were born into — because the month is the strongest voice in the eight characters. Whatever star rules that voice names the pattern.
How a pattern is named
The main hidden character of the Month Pillar's branch — its main qi — is read as the "month command". Its Ten Star role toward your Day Master gives the pattern its name, usually strengthened when the same star also appears visibly among the stems. Ten classic patterns:
- Robust Base Pattern — the month branch's main qi is your own element (the classic "building the base" chart, 建禄).
- Blade Pattern — the month qi is your rival star.
- Eating God Pattern — month qi is your creative output.
- Hurting Officer Pattern — month qi is your sharp expression.
- Direct Wealth Pattern / Indirect Wealth Pattern — the month qi is what you manage.
- Direct Officer Pattern / Seven Killings Pattern — the month qi is what presses on you.
- Direct Resource Pattern / Indirect Resource Pattern — the month qi is what carries you.
What a pattern does
Knowing the pattern gives a reading its priority list. A Direct Wealth Pattern chart conventionally centers its narrative on money and management; a Seven Killings Pattern chart on pressure, ambition and decisive moves; an Eating God Pattern chart on craft and expression. Pattern is not destiny — it is the month's natural topic, the genre of the story the other seven characters keep returning to.
Our 1995 example: a Robust Base Pattern
The Yi Wood Day Master born 15 March 1995 has a Month Pillar of 己卯. The branch 卯's main hidden character is 乙 — the same element as the Day Master itself. By the convention above this names the chart's pattern after the day master's own kind: a Robust Base Pattern (建禄格). Paired with an engine score of strong, the traditional reading is a self-reliant, independent-natured chart whose main task is turning its robustness outward — output, wealth, responsibility. Notice how pattern and strength hand each other the same conclusion.
The honest size of the concept
Pattern theory is one of the most debated corners of BaZi: some schools weigh the pattern above everything, others treat it as a secondary frame next to strength and useful gods. Borderline cases — month qi hidden, or two stars contesting the command — produce genuinely different "patterns" in different traditions. Treat the pattern name on a chart as the month's opening bid in a conversation, not the final contract of a life.
Read your own month command — the chart page names your pattern and shows the reasoning behind it.
Related reading
- Strong, weak or balanced? — the strength judgment a pattern sits beside
- Hidden stems — how the month command is found inside the branch
- The Ten Gods — the cast the pattern is named from