MingPath is built on four thousand years of Chinese cosmological thought. Here are the basics.
Your birth moment is recorded as four pillars: year, month, day, and hour. Each pillar pairs a Heavenly Stem and an Earthly Branch, together mapping your chart onto the Five Elements.
Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water relate in cycles of generation and control. A balanced chart flows; an unbalanced one signals where attention helps.
In Chinese timekeeping, each two-hour period is one Earthly Branch. The hour you were born can change your entire chart — which is why we ask for it precisely.