Daeun: The Ten-Year Luck Pillars, and How to Read a Season

Come in, and pull the door to behind you — the hallway has gone cold since this morning. Take the chair by the window; it is still the warm one, and I have kept the best subject for last.

Here is a question that has sat underneath our four previous sittings, whether or not you put it into words. The eight characters of a saju chart are fixed at the moment of birth and never move again. A life does move. It moves a great deal. So how can a set of characters that stays perfectly still have anything to say about a person at twenty-two and again at fifty-one?

The answer this tradition gives is called daeun. In English we say the luck pillars, or the ten-year luck cycle. If your chart is the bowl you were handed, the luck pillars are the water that comes into it, season by season, ten years at a time. The bowl does not change shape. What stands in it does.

That is the whole idea. The rest of today is only the method.

Why the cycles begin at the month pillar

A saju chart is four pillars: year, month, day, and hour. Each pillar carries two characters, which is where the eight of the eight characters comes from. When the luck pillars are built, they are not built from the whole chart. They are built from one pillar only, and it is the month.

There is a reason, and it is a plain one. In this tradition the month pillar does not mark a calendar month. It marks a season: the segment of the solar year you arrived in, bounded by the solar terms that the old farming calendars used to say when the cold would break and the rain would come. The month pillar is the weather you were born into. So when the tradition wants to describe how the weather over a life keeps moving, it does the obvious thing. It starts where you came in and keeps walking through the seasons.

That walk uses the sexagenary cycle, the sixty stem-and-branch combinations that saju and BaZi both run on, and which you have already met in every pillar of your own chart. Take the month pillar, step to the neighbouring combination in the table, and you have the first luck pillar. Step again for the second. Each of those steps is given ten years.

So a set of luck pillars is not a separate oracle bolted onto your chart. It is your own month pillar, continued: the season you were born into, walked out slowly, one step per decade.

Each luck pillar carries two characters, as every pillar does: a heavenly stem above, an earthly branch below. You will hear it said that the first five years of a decade lean toward the stem and the last five toward the branch. It is a common way to read and I use it loosely myself, though I would not have you hold it tightly. The old books do not entirely agree, and a decade rarely divides as neatly as a rule does. Read the ten years as one season with a change of light partway through, and you will not go far wrong.

Forward or reverse: the direction of the walk

Two people born in the same month do not necessarily walk the seasons in the same direction. Some count forward through the sexagenary table, toward the seasons that were coming. Some count backward, toward the seasons just passed. Forward and reverse, the tradition calls them, and which one you are given is settled by two things: whether the heavenly stem of your birth year is yang or yin, and whether you are a man or a woman.

The rule pairs them crosswise. A man born in a yang year and a woman born in a yin year count forward. A man born in a yin year and a woman born in a yang year count in reverse. That is the whole of it, and it does not bend for anybody.

I will be honest about this rule, since someone always asks. The reasoning behind the pairing is old and formal: yang and yin are assigned directions before anything else is said of them, and the sexes are folded into the same scheme. I apply the rule because the readings built on it have held up in front of me for forty years. I do not pretend it was arrived at by measurement, and where my tradition is inherited rather than demonstrated I would rather say so.

Now the part that matters more than the rule. Neither direction is better than the other. Forward is not progress and reverse is not decline, whatever the two words suggest to an English ear. They are two ways of walking out of the same door, and in every chart I have read, ease and effort were distributed along the road regardless of which way it ran. If someone tells you a reverse direction is unfortunate, they have told you about their own reading and nothing about you.

You will not do this arithmetic by hand, and there is no virtue in it. A manseryeok, the ten-thousand-year calendar this craft runs on, or any competent saju or BaZi calculator will set the direction and lay the pillars out in a column for you. Your work is the reading, not the counting.

When the first one begins

The pillars are drawn. When does the first of them start?

Here the tradition counts, and the counting is one of the more charming pieces of arithmetic I know. You look from the moment of birth to the nearest solar term boundary: forward to the one approaching, if your direction runs forward, or back to the one just passed, if it runs in reverse. You count the days in between. Then you convert, at three days to one year.

That ratio is the whole instrument. Because the bounding terms fall roughly a month apart, the number it produces lands somewhere between about one and about ten. Someone born a few days from a boundary gets a small number and changes water early. Someone born deep in the middle of a season gets a larger one and waits longer for the first turn.

Say your count gives four. Then your first luck pillar begins somewhere around your fourth year, and the ones after it around fourteen, twenty-four, thirty-four, and onward at ten-year intervals. Nothing in that number is a grade. It is a starting position, the way a runner's lane is.

You will find schools that carry the leftover days further, converting a remainder into months, and practitioners who reckon the resulting age differently, since this craft grew up around a manner of counting age that is not the one in your passport. The difference is months, not years. I mention it so that you are not alarmed if two charts disagree by a little. Neither is lying to you.

Before the first luck pillar opens there is a stretch, your early childhood, with no ten-year cycle standing over it at all. Those years are read from the natal chart itself, and often from the month pillar the cycle has not yet stepped away from. A child in that stretch is living in the bowl as it was given, before the first water arrives.

Let me set a marker here, because this is where people go wrong. The age at which a luck pillar begins is a hinge, not a door. Nothing shuts on the eve of your thirty-fourth birthday and nothing swings open on the morning of it. What the tradition describes is closer to the way March becomes April: you notice afterward that you have been dressing differently for some weeks. If you ever hear luck pillars spoken of as dated events, with something scheduled to arrive on a particular day, set that calendar down. It is not what this is.

Soil, season, weather: three layers at once

So far we have two things on the table: the natal chart, which does not move, and the luck pillar, which changes about every ten years. A third completes the picture well enough for a beginner.

The third is annual luck, seun in Korean: the influence of the year itself. Each year carries its own stem and branch, exactly as a pillar does, and it passes across your chart and across whatever luck pillar you happen to be standing in, and then it goes. Finer divisions exist below it, month by month and even day by day, but you do not need them yet.

I find the three easiest to keep straight as soil, season, and weather.

The natal chart is the soil: what this ground is made of, how it holds water, what has always grown in it without coaxing and what has always needed it. The luck pillar is the season: a long stretch, ten years of it, in which the light stands at a certain angle and the water sits at a certain level. Annual luck is the weather. This one year, with its own sun and its own rain, arriving inside that season and leaving at the end of it.

Read alone, each of the three will mislead you. Read together, they explain one another. There are bright days in winter and downpours in July. A quiet decade will hold a year in which a door comes open, and a generous decade will hold a year that asks to be crossed with more care. This is why a person who has heard only what the current year is said to hold knows very little, since one shower tells you nothing about a harvest, and why the shape of the decade alone says little about this particular spring. Three layers, laid one over another. That is how a reading is actually built.

Which brings me to the honest limit of the thing. Luck pillars will not hand you a date, and I would be wary of anyone who offers one. What they give is coarser and, to my mind, far more useful: a sense of which stretch of years has tended to ask a great deal of you and which has tended to carry you along. I cannot tell you the day. I can tell you the season, and a season is long enough to prepare in, which a day never is.

What a season is actually for

A last word on the use of all this, since the use is the point.

The families who fished the flats below my grandfather's village did not wait for the tide. They read it. The tide comes in whether or not anyone is watching; the only question in their hands was whether the nets had been mended before it arrived. Luck pillars are studied for that reason and no other. In a decade where the water rises, you get the boat ready. In one where it sits low, you mend and put things by. Neither decade is a verdict. They are different work.

There is also a use for the pillars looking backward, and it is the one I recommend to beginners first. You have already lived some decades. Set them beside the luck pillars that covered them and ask plain questions. Which stretch did learning stick in? Which stretch had people constantly coming and going through the house? Which years did you spend rooting yourself somewhere with very little help?

You are not grading those decades. You are calibrating. You are learning what your soil does when a particular season lands on it, so that when a season of that kind comes round again, and they do come round, you have some notion of what preparation suits you rather than guessing in the dark.

A certain temper comes with this, and it may be the best of what the study offers. People who have learned to see their years in seasons get less giddy in the easy stretches and less frantic in the effortful ones. They stop taking a good year as proof of their own virtue and a hard year as proof of their own failure. They know a season for what it is: long, particular, and passing.

We will stop here, and not only for today. That is the five sittings done. The eight characters and how the four pillars are built; the five elements as the materials; the day master as the one the chart is written around; the ten gods as the language of relation; and now the luck pillars and their slow weather. It is a beginning, and I have taught it as one. There is a great deal more, and none of it is a secret. It is simply longer.

Eight characters will not hold a whole person, and five afternoons of an old man talking will not either. What both can do is show you the map: where the ground rises, where the water runs, where a road that looks short goes the long way round. The map does not walk. If you would like one thing to carry out of this room, let it be this. Look up your own chart sometime, unhurried, and find where the luck pillars fall for you, which decade you stand in now and which you have lately come out of. Then set the paper aside for a week before concluding anything. Conclusions keep. They keep very well.

Thank you for sitting through five of these with a man who takes the long way to everything. The kettle has gone cold and the light is off the sill. The last step, as it has been every time, is yours.