This person and me — what does the Korean saju tradition say about the pairing?

Two charts before two people

A compatibility reading in this tradition starts the same way a single reading does. Each of the two birth dates is turned into its own chart first — four columns, eight characters, each column fixed by its own calendar rule. Nothing is compared until both charts exist.

The Korean word for the pairing reading is gunghap. What it names is the second step, and the second step is performed on the charts. That is not a technicality. It is the reason every sentence further down this page has a chart or a pairing as its subject and never a person.

What is actually set against what

The five elements carry most of the comparison. Each of the eight characters in a chart carries one of five — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — so a chart arrives at the comparison as a set of elements rather than as a description of anybody.

The tradition has two names for how two such sets sit together. Where one set is read as feeding the other, the pairing is called sangsaeng (相生), mutually generating. Where one is read as wearing the other down, it is called sanggeuk (相克), mutually overcoming. A chart has four columns, so a pairing is four columns against four, and the two names can fall differently on different columns.

Neither name is a verdict. Sangsaeng is not a pass and sanggeuk is not a failure; they are the two ways the tradition sorts a pair of element sets. A pairing sorted the second way is written in exactly the same form as one sorted the first way, because the form of the sentence is fixed by its subject and not by whether the answer is welcome.

What this site does not do with a second date

Readers usually arrive at this question by searching for a compatibility calculator. This site does not have one. The calculator here takes one birth date at a time and returns one chart; there is no second-date screen in this build, and this page does not exist to promise one.

There is also no name field anywhere on this site and no list of people to choose from. That is a decision rather than an omission. A site that offers a second person to pick is the party naming that person, and this site would rather not be that party.

Where a pairing sentence stops

A pairing sentence in this tradition can go as far as the combination and no further. "These two charts fall into a mutually generating pair" is a sentence about a pair. "The other one is stubborn" is a sentence about somebody who never typed anything here, and it is not a sentence this site writes.

The line is not drawn at flattery. A pairing read as overcoming is written in the same shape as a pairing read as generating, and both stay on the pair. What decides whether a sentence is allowed here is its subject, and on this page the subject of a pairing sentence is the pairing.