Helpful and caution elements

Your day element is the top character of your day pillar, and the whole chart is read from it. Every other character in your four pillars, hidden stems included, is asked one question: does it support the day element, or does it press on it? The month pillar counts most, because the season you were born in carries the most weight. Your day pillar's animal counts next. It sits right under your day element, and support that close holds firmer than support from further away.

Those two totals become a percentage. At 48 or above the day element reads strong. At 32 or below it reads weak, and in between, balanced.

The lists follow from that, and from why. A strong day element is read by what makes it strong. With too much of its own kind, what helps is what restrains it, then what it produces. When over-fed, what helps is what it manages, which breaks up the feeding. A weak one is read by what presses on it. Under heavy pressure from what controls it, what helps is what feeds it, turning pressure into support. When swamped by what it manages, more of its own kind helps. When drained by what it produces, what feeds it helps. Your caution elements push it further the way it leans. A balanced day element takes the side it leans toward, with one caution element instead of two.

Strength alone is not the whole picture. Traditional practice has a second rule: Johu, balancing the climate. A chart born in deep winter is cold and wet, whatever its day element is doing. One born in high summer is hot and dry. When the season is that extreme, easing it comes first.

So for a deep winter birth month (the Rat or Ox month), fire and wood move to the front of your helpful list. For high summer (the Horse or Goat month), water and metal lead instead. The elements from step one are not thrown away. They follow behind, because a chart still needs its support. It just needs warmth or moisture first.

One exception: relief that is your own element is skipped. A fire day element born in high summer is not helped by more fire. That is the excess the season already brought.

The other eight months are left alone. Johu corrects extremes, and applying it all year would make it the rule rather than the correction.

The season only leads when your chart lacks that relief itself. Say a winter chart already holds at least an even share of fire: a fifth of the whole, counting the stems hidden inside each animal. It is warm enough, and the season steps back. The same holds for water in a summer chart. About a third of charts born in those four months hold their own relief.

This is still a simplified form of the rule. We say so because the full one is well known. The classical season tables name the relief separately for each day element in each month. We apply one rule to every day element instead. Many practitioners also count the Pig and Snake months as seasonal. We do not.

• Daily rhythm, monthly, yearly and decade luck. When the pillar of a day, month, year or decade carries one of your helpful elements, it adds points to that period's theme. A caution element adds points elsewhere.
• Pair readings. A compatibility score is built from five things. One is whether two people's lists overlap, and whether what steadies one is on the other's caution list.
• Traits and the Oracle. Both read the lists when they describe what tends to settle you.

Your glyph does not depend on them. The 450-type code is built only from strength, element, drive and rhythm. So a change to how the helpful list is worked out never changes your glyph.

Classical practice has five routes to a helpful element, not two. This app uses strength balancing and the seasonal rule. It leaves out Tonggwan (a go-between for two locked elements), Byeongyak (treating a chart's worst problem) and Jeonwang (a chart so one-sided it follows its strongest element). A practitioner weighing all five may reach a different list from the one this page shows.

The last one matters most for a few charts. About one chart in ten scores at an extreme: 12 or below, or 70 or above. A school that reads such charts as following their strongest element would give many of them the opposite list: more of what they already have, not less. Practitioners disagree on whether such charts really follow. So we apply the ordinary rule to every chart, and say so here.

The lists are also short by design: two elements, sometimes three when the season leads. They are a leaning, not a prescription, and nothing here is advice about what to do.