Gunghap: what a Korean compatibility reading compares

What is gunghap?

Gunghap (궁합, 宮合) began as a marriage custom. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture defines it as divining, by yin-yang and the five elements, whether a bride and groom suit each other as spouses (궁합, E0006817). It belonged to the betrothal stage (납채, napchae): the groom’s side sent the 사주단자 (saju danja), a paper with his birth year, month, day and hour, and the bride’s side had a diviner read it, gunghap included. If the reading was favorable, her family sent back a paper naming the wedding day, and the match was agreed.

The same entry distinguishes two layers: an outer gunghap (겉궁합) read from the twelve branches, the zodiac animals, and an inner gunghap (속궁합) read from the five elements. It is also frank about the history: couples whose charts showed an inauspicious sign (살, sal) sometimes didn’t marry. It adds that gunghap has also served as a polite way to turn down a proposal, and that the custom has been fading with industrialization and changing ideas about tradition.

What a pair reading actually compares

A full reading works in layers, from the center of each chart outward. None of them is a verdict on its own, and a careful reader weighs them together.

• The two Day Masters: the stem of each day pillar, the character that stands for each person. What is each to the other in the ten-god system?
• The two day branches, the “spouse palace” of each chart: do they combine, clash or share a trine?
• The elements: does one chart have plenty of what the other lacks?
• The year animals: the outer gunghap, the layer most people already know.
• Folk layers such as wonjin, which some readers check but which sit outside the element and branch arithmetic.

Day Master compatibility: the ten gods each way

Every Day Master sees every other stem as one of the ten gods (the ten gods), so a pair of Day Masters is really two ten gods, one in each direction. Both follow from the two element cycles Korean readers call 상생 (sangsaeng, feeding) and 상극 (sanggeuk, checking). When your element feeds theirs, they are your output (Eating God or Hurting Officer) and you are their resource. When your element checks theirs, they are your wealth and you are their officer. Two stems of the same element are companions to each other: 甲 Jia and 乙 Yi, for instance, are Rob Wealth to each other.

The table sorts all 100 Day Master pairings by those five relations. Notice that the two directions are never the same kind of god, except for companions. That is the structural point of a Day Master reading: one person tends to supply, steady, stretch or check the other, and the roles run differently in each direction. For your own Day Master’s exact answer against each of the ten stems, use the ten-god lookup table.

The five stem combinations (干合)

Five pairs of stems are said to combine (合, hap): 甲己, 乙庚, 丙辛, 丁壬 and 戊癸. The Ming handbook 三命通會 gives each a name, from the “upright” combination of 甲 and 己 (中正之合) to the “unfeeling” one of 戊 and 癸 (無情之合), and explains each pair as a marriage between element families. Metal fears fire, it says, so 庚, the yang “elder brother” of metal, marries his yin “younger sister” 辛 into the fire family as the wife of 丙: 庚兄乃将辛妹嫁火家與丙為妻 (三命通會, vol. 2). Some of the old names, such as “lewd” (淫慝之合) for 丁 and 壬, are moral labels we don’t repeat as verdicts.

In our engine every one of the five has the same shape, and it is the shape of the handbook’s marriage: a yang stem and the yin stem of the element it checks, so the yin stem is the yang stem’s Direct Wealth and the yang stem is the yin stem’s Direct Officer. Our pair check shows a stem combination as a bonus line and never lets it change the badge. About 10% of all day-pillar pairings have one.

Day animals: combinations, clashes and trines

The day branch is the lower character of the day pillar, often called the spouse palace. Our engine draws three kinds of line between two branches. A combination (六合) pairs branches such as 子 and 丑, Rat and Ox. 三命通會 opens its section on these pairs with 合者和也, “to combine is to be in harmony,” yin and yang meeting. A clash (六沖) joins opposite corners of the circle, such as 子 and 午, Rat and Horse. The handbook explains that branches seven places apart, counting both ends, clash, just as a stem meets its “killing” stem seven places on. A trine (三合) groups three branches four apart that build one element together. The same volume also discusses harms (六害) and punishments (三刑), which our pair check leaves out.

A clash sounds alarming, and the handbook does call it 煞, a harmful influence. It also says that clashes, though mostly read as unlucky, are sometimes very fortunate (大槩為凶然有為福之甚者). We read a clash as friction and movement: in a couple that can look like frank arguments that clear the air, or two people who keep each other from standing still. A combination can mean ease, and also two people so absorbed in each other that other things slide. Neither is a verdict on its own.

Element balance: the inner gunghap

The encyclopedia’s inner gunghap is the five-element layer, and its entry on saju explains why the tradition cares: saju values balance above all, a chart whose elements are spread evenly is read as well built, and a lopsided one is meant to be evened out. Among the ways the tradition does that, the entry lists a well-matched gunghap, next to a good name and a good direction (사주, E0025957). A reader therefore looks at each chart’s element count and asks whether one person has plenty of an element the other is short of. Schools weigh this differently, and it needs both full charts, including hours if you have them, which is why a quick animal check can’t do it.

You can try this yourself: get each person’s free chart, which shows the five-element count, and put the two counts side by side (what the five elements are, and three ways to count them). Look for the gaps, not for a score, and remember that the count itself depends on the method.

A worked example: two fictional birthdays

Here is the whole comparison for two invented people, born on October 5, 1994 and April 22, 1996, with no birth times. Every character comes from our engine. Their day pillars are 甲子 and 己丑.

Almost every layer lines up, as the list below shows, and that is what makes the example useful: it still says nothing about how these two treat each other. A reader would describe a pair that tends to fall into shared routines quickly, each bringing an element the other lacks, and would then ask for the birth hours, which add two characters to each chart and can change the element picture.

• Day Masters: 甲 Jia (yang wood) and 己 Ji (yin earth). The second is the first person’s Direct Wealth, and the first is the second’s Direct Officer. They are also a stem combination, the one 三命通會 calls upright (中正之合).
• Day branches: 子 and 丑, Rat and Ox, a combination (六合).
• Year animals, the outer gunghap: Dog (甲戌) and Rat (丙子), neither a combination, a clash nor a wonjin pair.
• Elements, counting the six visible characters: the first chart has no fire, and the second has one fire; the second has no wood or metal, where the first has two wood and one metal.
• Our pair check: The Tight Knot, with the stem-combination bonus line.

Two people with the same day pillar

If you and your partner share a day pillar, you share a Day Master and a day branch: the two are Friend to each other, and the branches are the same animal. It happens in one pairing of every 60, about 1.7%. Our pair check calls it The Mirror, and Horan’s note for it is about habits, not fate: “You tend to speed up, stall and dodge the same things at the same moments. Easy company, until nobody brings up the hard part. Decide in advance who raises the awkward stuff.” Each of the 60 day pillars has its own page, so you can read up on the structure you share; how two people live with it is still up to them.

Wonjin: the Korean “bad pairs” are folklore

Search for Korean zodiac bad matches and you will meet 원진 (wonjin), six pairs of year animals that Korean compatibility lore says grate on each other: Rat–Goat (子未), Ox–Horse (丑午), Tiger–Rooster (寅酉), Rabbit–Monkey (卯申), Dragon–Pig (辰亥) and Snake–Dog (巳戌). The National Institute of Korean Language files the word under folklore (민속) (Urimalsaem), and our Korean zodiac guide has the dictionary definitions. The question here is what wonjin has to do with a chart.

Less than people expect. Korean readers do look at it: the encyclopedia’s entry on saju lists 원진 alongside the punishments, breaks and harms as things a reader may check (사주, E0025957). But it is not one of the relations our engine draws, and it never coincides with one: no wonjin pair is a clash or a combination, and in every pair each animal sits one step from the other’s clash partner, a near miss rather than a direct opposition. The folk explanations are stories, not arithmetic: the National Folk Museum retells a tale in which the rabbit detests the monkey’s red bottom, the same color as its own eyes, and gives it as the origin of the saying 卯申怨嗔 (NFM, Rabbit). We pass wonjin on as trivia, never as advice to part.

What our free pair check does

Our pair check is deliberately small. You enter two birthdays; the page works out the two day pillars in your browser and compares only those: whether the day animals combine, clash, match or do neither, and whether the day stems share an element, feed one another or check one another. That gives one of twelve badges, with Horan’s note on how the pair tends to move. A bonus line appears for a shared trine (16.7% of pairings) or a stem combination. The link it makes carries only the two day pillars: no birthdays, no names.

It doesn’t read hours, months, element counts or wonjin, so it is a first look, not a full gunghap. Most pairs, 75%, have day animals that neither combine, clash nor match, and the table shows how often each badge comes up.

Why we don’t score couples

Many compatibility tools return a percentage or a match verdict. We don’t, for three reasons. The tradition has no agreed formula for one: schools weigh the layers above differently, so any single number is a site’s own recipe. A score invites exactly the use the encyclopedia describes as history, a chart deciding whether two people should be together. And there is no evidence that any chart comparison predicts how a relationship turns out.

So every badge describes a pattern of give and take, and none is a bad match. If a reading anywhere tells you to leave someone because of your charts, that is the reader talking, not the tradition requiring it.

About this page

Written with AI (Claude) from the sources listed and our calculation engine. Horan and Kachi are fictional characters, and nothing here predicts events. The rules behind every chart: how we calculate.