Why Does the Korean Word for Fate Mean Eight Characters?

Tim Ferriss says the everyday Korean word for a person's lot in life, palja, means eight characters. Korean has two sets of numbers, and one was borrowed from Chinese centuries ago. In that borrowed set, eight is pal, and pal does not sound like a word for getting rich, so the Chinese prosperity pun does not survive the trip to Korea.

One kind of Korean fortune-telling uses a birth chart called saju palja, taken from the Chinese characters for four pillars and eight characters. The pillars are the year, month, day, and hour of birth. On the traditional Chinese calendar, each pillar is written with two characters. Four times two is eight, and those eight characters are read as a map of a whole life. Palja is the ordinary word for fate, so in Korea eight is built into the word for destiny.

In that same borrowed set, four and death can both be read sa.