The single most useful idea in saju for most people is not the day master or the elements. It is daeun (대운), the ten-year cycle. Your natal chart is fixed; the daeun is the weather it lives in, and it changes every decade. This is why a person can be cautious and unlucky in their twenties and bold and successful in their thirties without becoming a different person. Here is how it works.
How cycles are calculated
From the month pillar, the chart generates a sequence of stems and branches, one pair per decade, running forward or backward through the calendar depending on your sex and the yin or yang of your birth year. The starting age is calculated from the days between your birth and the nearest solar term, so one person’s cycles change at 3, 13, 23 and another’s at 8, 18, 28. A reading gives your exact ages.
What changes when a cycle begins
A new pair of characters enters the chart for ten years and interacts with everything already there. If the incoming element is what your day master needs (your “useful god”), the decade is supportive: things that were hard become easier. If it is what your chart already has too much of, or it clashes with a key pillar, the decade brings friction in that domain. Readers describe cycles by theme: a study cycle, a wealth cycle, a relationship cycle, a moving cycle.
The transition years
The first and last year of each cycle are usually turbulent: the old energy is leaving and the new has not settled. Many people can name the year their life “turned”; it is very often a cycle boundary. Knowing yours in advance changes how you read a rough year.
Reading the cycle you are in
- Find your current daeun pair and its element.
- Ask whether that element supports or burdens your day master.
- Check the ten god it forms: officer (structure, authority), wealth (money, relationships for men), resource (learning, support, mothers), output (expression, children for women), companion (peers, competition).
- Note any clash with your day or month branch.
That gives you the theme. The yearly luck (세운) then colours each year inside the cycle.
Why this is the part worth paying for
Element portraits are fun; cycles are actionable. “Your current decade favours building credentials, and the next one favours using them” is the kind of sentence that changes when someone goes back to school or starts a company. It is also the part that is hardest to get from a free calculator, because it needs the starting age and the direction to be computed correctly.
Your cycles, listed
Master Haewol’s Classical Saju on SAJUBY lays out your ten-year cycles with the theme of each, marks the one you are in, and reads the next five years one by one. It is the section most readers say they reread.
