Decade luck

Classical saju treats life as layers of time. Your four birth pillars are fixed. On top of them, practitioners track luck pillars that move forward: decade luck for the long view and yearly luck for each year.

Decade luck answers one question: “What is the longer background during this stretch of life?” It does not replace your birth chart. It sits over it like weather over land.

Each decade pillar is counted on from your month pillar, one step at a time. Two things decide how: which direction the count goes, and at what age the first chapter opens.

The direction follows the classical rule. A man born in a yang year, or a woman born in a yin year, counts forward. The other two count backward. The opening age comes from the distance between your birth moment and the solar term that governs it, counted three days to a year. So it usually lands between one and ten, not on your tenth birthday. The strip below opens at 7 as an example. Yours is worked out from your own chart.

If you skipped the gender question in the birth form, we do not guess. Those charts keep the older simplified count: one step every ten years from age zero, counting forward. A direction chosen for you would be wrong for half the people it was chosen for.

Opening day: the time between your birth moment and the solar term that governs it. Three days count as a year of life, one day as four months, and two hours as ten days. Your first chapter opens when that much of your life has passed, on a date of its own. Every chapter after it opens ten years later, on the same date. A distance of 16 days opens it 5 years and 4 months after your birth. Each chapter moves your month pillar one step along the cycle of 10 stems and 12 branches, forward or backward.

Starting age: the number a saju chart prints beside its decades. It is that span rounded to the nearest whole year, never below one: 5 in the example above. The chapters on the timeline are counted in calendar years. Each one starts in the year its opening day falls in.

For example, say your first chapter opens in the year you turn 7. Then ages 0 to 6 sit under your month pillar, ages 7 to 16 under the first decade pillar, and ages 17 to 26 under the second.

Some schools read the years before your first chapter through Sowun, a minor pillar that moves yearly, and we use your month pillar instead.

Published saju calculators differ on three details, so we name ours. Some drop a leftover single day and round a leftover two days up. That can make their starting age one lower than ours. Some open each chapter in your birth year plus the rounded starting age. For about one chart in four, when the opening day falls in a different year, that is a year away from ours. Some also count age the Korean way, starting at one, which moves each chapter a year earlier again. All of them agree on the direction and the order of the decade pillars.

If you skipped the gender question, the chapters stay on the simplified count described above: ages 0 to 9, 10 to 19, and so on.

Each decade has 2 scored parts, the stem and the branch. Universe shows the count, for example 0 supportive · 0 demanding · 2 steady, then combines them into one chapter label.

The overall decade label combines both parts. If they agree, the chapter takes their shared label. If they disagree, one helpful and one caution, the chapter reads push and pull. If one part is steady and the other is not, the part that is not steady decides.

The two halves also weigh equally when the decade's theme is chosen. A year leans on its stem. But many Korean practitioners read a decade mainly through its branch, which carries its season, or split the ten years five and five between the two halves. We give each half the same weight, which sits between those readings.

Push and pull is not a middle setting or a shrug. It means a chapter pulls two ways at once, and that is the only way a decade gets this label. Roughly one chapter in five does.