Saju compatibility (궁합): how two charts click

For centuries, before a Korean wedding was settled, two birth charts were laid side by side and read together. The practice is called gunghap (궁합), and it's still alive — softened from a veto into a conversation, consulted for partners, crushes, even business partnerships. What makes it interesting isn't a match score; it's the method. A real 궁합 reading works through layers, and each layer asks a different question about how two natures meet.

Layer one: how your Day Masters relate

The first check is elemental. Take both Day Masters and ask how their elements sit in the two cycles: does one feed the other (Wood feeding Fire — one gives, the other glows)? Does one control the other (Water on Fire — friction, but also the banking that keeps a flame from burning out)? Are they the same element — instant recognition, with the risk of crowding?

None of these verdicts is "good" or "bad" on its own. Feeding can exhaust the feeder; control can be exactly the steadiness a scattered chart needs. The reading names the current between two cores — then looks to the next layers to see whether the rest of each chart eases that current or sharpens it.

Layer two: the stem bonds (천간합)

The ten stems hide a famous pattern: five pairs, each sitting exactly five places apart in the cycle, that classical texts describe as bonding — two characters that, when they meet, merge toward a third element. 甲 and 己 bond into Earth; 乙 and 庚 into Metal; 丙 and 辛 into Water; 丁 and 壬 into Wood; 戊 and 癸 into Fire.

When two people's Day Masters form one of these pairs, tradition reads it as a built-in pull — a couple that combines into something with its own element and character. It's the closest thing 궁합 has to "written in the calendar."

Layer three: the day branches

Under each Day Master sits a day branch — the spouse palace, the chart's relationship seat. A 궁합 reading checks how the two day branches relate: some pairs form the quiet six harmonies (육합), read as ease; some sit directly opposite in the twelve-branch wheel and clash (충), read as spark and volatility; some ally through the 삼합 teams. Ease isn't automatically better — plenty of long marriages run on a well-managed clash — but the reader wants to know which kind of weather the pair defaults to.

Layer four: what each chart is missing

The subtlest check is complementarity. Charts lean; most are missing something. When one chart's abundance is the other's missing element, tradition reads it as supply: a Water-heavy person can be exactly what a parched Fire chart needs. This is the layer that most often redeems a rocky layer one — friction between cores, but each carrying the other's missing piece.

Read all four layers together and you get what 궁합 actually is: not a verdict on whether you should be together, but a map of the chemistry — where it flows on its own, and where it will ask for work. That's how we read it here: two natures, side by side, for fun and self-reflection.