Martin Luther King Jr. — BaZi Chart Analysis

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister and a central leader of the U.S. civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968.

The chart, as computed

The chart below is computed rather than looked up. Solar terms set the Month pillar and 立春 sets the Year pillar, so neither follows the Gregorian calendar, and a birth date close to either boundary lands differently than a naive reading of the date would suggest.

Day Master: 庚 (Geng, yang Metal). The engine reads this chart's day master as somewhat strong, in a 正印格 (Zheng Yin) structure — a chart organised around support, learning and backing.

This is one of the minority of profiles here with a recorded birth hour, so all four pillars are computed and the hour column below is real rather than inferred.

What the ten gods put where

• Year stem — 偏印 (Pian Yin): unorthodox support — self-taught, oblique, private.
• Month stem — 正财 (Zheng Cai): steady wealth — earned, incremental, held.
• Hour stem — 食神 (Shi Shen): the output — expression, craft, ease of production.

Read the gods as positions rather than personalities. Each label describes the relationship between a stem and the Day Master, so it is chart-relative by construction: move the day master and every god in the chart changes. This is the reason a per-chart table beats any generic account of Geng.

The branch relations the engine found

• 六害 · a harm — 丑 (Chou) / 午 (Wu), in the month and hour branches. A friction relation — attrition rather than collision.
• 六破 · a break — 丑 (Chou) / 辰 (Chen), in the month and year branches. A destabilising relation, weaker than a clash.

Reading it

A somewhat strong Geng Metal day master in a Zheng Yin structure, with Pian Yin on the year, Zheng Cai on the month and Shi Shen on the hour — both resource gods and one output god, distributed one to a pillar. The two branch relations are both friction rather than collision, a Chou–Wu harm and a Chou–Chen break. A strong day master with doubled resource is read as a chart with more backing than it needs for itself, which the tradition treats as the configuration of someone whose resource is spent outward.

What this page does not claim

A BaZi chart is a symbolic framework for reading temperament and timing, not an explanation of a life. Everything above describes a configuration; none of it asserts that the configuration caused any documented event, and no reading here works backwards from a known biography to a chart feature that would have predicted it. Public birth records are also imperfect — where the hour is unknown, this page says so rather than assigning one.

This is not a substitute for medical, financial or legal advice.

Work out your own chart

If you want the same table for yourself, the BaZi chart calculator computes it from a birth date and time. Terms are defined in the BaZi glossary; other charted figures are indexed at celebrity charts.

Birth data as held on file: 1929-01-15, hour 12. The birth-data source is cited on the Chinese edition of this page.