What the Number of Stems and Branches Has to Do With Real Life

Translator's note. A short demolition of the commonest party trick in Chinese fate reading: counting how many times an element appears in the chart and assigning that number to a fact about the person's family. Three yin means three mothers; five piancai means five fathers. Lü's objection is not mystical but demographic — identical charts cannot produce identical sibling counts, and the historical record contains men with hundreds of children.

Matching the number of stems and branches to real life is one of the commonest methods among people who practise fate prediction. See three seals in someone's chart and they will say the man has three mothers. See five indirect-wealth stems and they will say he has five fathers, and that his mother has four lovers. See five parallels-and-robs and they will say he has five siblings. This is an absurd way of reading.

Why is it absurd? First, must people born under the same bazi have the same number of siblings? It is not remotely possible. Second, a bazi has eight characters. Count even the hidden stems in the branches and the maximum number of any one element is twelve — four guihai charts, for instance. Never mind that some emperors of antiquity had dozens of children: Li Longji of the Tang had fifty-nine, the Kangxi emperor fifty-five, and in modern times Yuan Shikai had thirty-two. Go and look at the polygamous countries of the Middle East, or at Indonesia and Malaysia, where wealthy households with a dozen, twenty, thirty siblings are everywhere. The Guinness Book of Records lists the most prolific man in human history as Ismail of Morocco, whose fertility is breathtaking: five hundred and twenty-five sons and three hundred and forty-two daughters. Faced with that, can counting numbers tell you how many siblings a person has? All that counting is a joke, and it does not match objective reality at all.

Used now and then, with the actual situation in view, counting has some use. People born in the fifties and sixties mostly had around five siblings. Children born in cities after the late eighties were mostly only children, and those with two or three siblings mostly came from the countryside, because of the state's birth planning. Now the two-child policy has been relaxed. But to predict by counting alone, divorced from history and divorced from region, is genuinely absurd.

Studying the counting method wastes time and energy and is still inaccurate. People should give it up. Rather than study something that can never be accurate, spend the energy on things that can make prediction accurate.