What are the ten year cycles and the yearly cycle?
In saju (사주), the Korean reading of the four pillars of birth, the eight characters you are born with stay the same for as long as you live. What changes is the conditions those eight characters stand in, and that change is read in three layers. The ten year cycles (대운, daeun) are the season, turning over once a decade. The yearly cycle (세운, seun) is that year's weather. The month cycle (월운, wolun) is the wind of one month. The same tree standing in spring and standing in winter is in a completely different situation, and the tree has not changed at all. Almost everything saju says about timing comes out of that one distinction. If day master and five elements are new to you, read what saju is first.
| Layer | What it is | When it turns over |
|---|---|---|
| Ten year cycles (대운) | The season around the chart | Every ten years, from an age set by your own chart |
| Yearly cycle (세운) | This year's weather inside that season | Once a year, at the solar term that opens spring, not on 1 January |
| Month cycle (월운) | The wind of the month | Between roughly the 5th and the 8th, because months are cut by solar terms |
Why does my ten year cycle start at a different age from someone else's?
Because the starting age is not the same number for everyone. It is set by the distance between your birth day and the nearest solar term, the point where one traditional month turns into the next. That distance is measured and converted into years, so one person's first cycle opens at three and another's at nine, and both are entirely ordinary. Once set it never drifts. Someone whose cycles begin at three changes at 13, at 23, at 33, and so on for the whole of life.
The direction is not the same for everyone either. Depending on the year of birth and on gender, the cycles run forward from the month of birth or backwards from it. This is why a man and a woman born on the very same day can have cycles moving in opposite directions, so that at forty they stand in quite different seasons although their eight characters are identical. Sharing a birthday does not mean sharing a life, and the page on why readings differ covers the other reasons.
This part is arithmetic and I let a computer work it out, as anyone would. Reading what a season means against the particular chart it lands on is the slow part.
Why is a ten year cycle not one block of ten years?
A cycle is written with two characters, one above and one below, exactly like the pillars of a natal chart. The upper character is a heavenly stem, Gap (甲), yang wood, or Gye (癸), yin water, or one of the other eight. The lower is an earthly branch, which carries a season and a kind of ground. The two do not work at the same strength across the decade. The first five years belong mostly to the upper character, and the last five to the lower one.
That split is worth knowing because it explains a decade that seems to contain two different periods. A common shape is a first half where you keep wanting to begin things, with ideas arriving faster than you can act on them, followed by a second half where one of those things takes a physical form: the job, the move, the thing actually built. Nothing contradicted itself in the middle. The half of the cycle doing the work simply changed over. When someone tells me the last few years have felt nothing like the start of the decade, this is often what happened.
What happens when one cycle turns into the next?
The years either side of a cycle change are called gyoungi (교운기), the crossing period. It is the changeover between seasons, and like the weeks between winter and spring it is unsettled. Work that was running along gets wound up, a position changes, a place changes, and several of these often land close together rather than spacing themselves out.
This does not mean something bad is due. It means the ground underfoot is moving while you are trying to stand on it, which is a different problem and a manageable one. For most people the advice is simply this: do not pile your largest decisions into the middle of that stretch if you have a choice about when they happen. Sign, move, marry or launch either side of it rather than in the thick of it.
Known in advance, a crossing period becomes a line in your calendar. Not known, the same period becomes a run of bad luck you have to explain to yourself afterwards. The events are the same either way. What changes is whether you chose the timing.
How do a ten year cycle and a single year work together?
The ten year cycle is the season and the year is the weather inside it, so the two can easily disagree. A mild decade contains rough years. A heavy decade contains years where everything opens up. In 2026, for example, the year is headed by Byeong (丙), yang fire, and that same character falls on every living person at once. It cannot mean the same thing for all of them. For someone whose decade already runs hot and dry, one more source of heat is one more thing to manage. For someone whose chart and decade are both cold, that same year is the first real warmth in a long time.
The month cycle sits underneath both, useful for choosing which fortnight to do a thing in rather than which year. Note that it does not change on the first of the month. Because traditional months are cut by solar terms, it turns over somewhere between the 5th and the 8th, which catches people out.
So asking only how this year looks gets you half an answer. A difficult year inside a supportive decade and the same year inside a demanding decade are two different situations calling for two different responses.
How does a cycle act on the eight characters I was born with?
A cycle does not arrive as a verdict. It arrives as more of something: more wood, more metal, more water, landing on a chart that already has its own proportions. What it does depends on what was already there, which is why the same decade is good news for one person and hard work for another.
Take a chart whose day master is Gap (甲), yang wood, the tall tree. If the chart stands in dry, hard ground, a decade that brings water is the decade the roots finally get what they have been short of, and it tends to show up as things becoming possible that were not possible before. If the chart is already waterlogged, that same decade is too much of a good thing and the reading is about drainage rather than drought. Same cycle, opposite advice. Working out which elements a chart is short of and which it has to spare is the business of balancing the five elements, and it comes before the cycles mean anything.
In the image method I use, this is the easiest part to see rather than calculate. The eight characters are painted as one scene, and a cycle is a change in the light and weather over that scene. You can look at a picture and tell whether rain is what this ground needed. The page on the image method explains how the scene is built, and the sample page shows a finished one.
Is there such a thing as a good cycle and a bad cycle?
I try not to use those words, because a cycle is a direction rather than a score. A decade in which money gathers and a decade in which your understanding of your own work deepens are different in kind, not better and worse. A ten year stretch where earnings drop is very often the stretch where the skill thickens, and people usually recognise this only from the far side of it.
The other thing worth saying plainly is that a quiet season does not mean nothing can be done. Inside a low decade there are years where a window opens, and finding those years and using them is the practical value of reading timing at all. So I do not write that in a given year a particular thing will happen to you. I write which season you are standing in, what it tends to ask for and tends to withhold, and what is worth doing when. The deciding stays yours.
What can this page not tell you?
This is general explanation. It can tell you what the ten year cycles are, why yours begin at the age they do, and how a season and a year pull against each other, but it cannot tell you which season you are in. That needs the whole chart, all eight characters with the hour of birth included, because a cycle means nothing until you know what it is landing on. Reading a cycle without the chart underneath it is like being handed a forecast without being told which country you are in.
Two further notes. If you do not know your birth time, the cycles can still be laid out, but parts of the reading are held more loosely and marked as uncertain rather than quietly smoothed over, which is covered on the page about an unknown birth time. And if you want to read your own cycle table first, how to read your saju chart shows where the numbers sit and what they are called. Nothing here says what will happen to you. It describes conditions and timing, and what you do inside them is the part no chart contains.
Reports are written in Korean at present. An English edition is in preparation and there is a waitlist for it.