궁합 · Compatibility
Saju compatibility: how two charts meet
In Korea this is the reading people ask for before a marriage — and, these days, out of curiosity about someone they have already decided on. It does not answer “should we?”. It shows where two charts pull toward each other, where they rub, and what each one gives the other.
The date is enough. A birth time makes the reading sharper, and leaving it out only means the reading says less about the hours of your lives.
What is actually being compared
Three meetings, read in order of how much weight the tradition gives them. The day stems are the two people themselves: five pairs of stems bind (천간합) and four pairs stand opposite (천간충). The day branches are the spouse palace, the seat a partner occupies in each chart. The year branches are the zodiac animals — the layer everyone knows, and the one a practitioner weighs least.
Then the part that matters more than any of them: what each chart is short of, and whether the other person happens to carry it. A chart that needs earth and meets someone whose chart is full of it has found something a zodiac table cannot show.
Why there is no score
A percentage would be easy to put here and easy to share, and it would be a lie. Two charts that clash are not doomed and two that bind are not safe; the clash is simply where the energy is, and the bind is where the comfort is. What a reading can honestly do is name those places so you recognise them when they show up.
For one person in depth, start with your own free Saju chart. To read the vocabulary used here — day master, elements, the ten gods — what is Saju covers it.