Feng Shui and Bazi: Which One Decides Fate?

Translator's note. The essay that fixes the division of labour between the two arts, written in 2001. Birth time decides the type of a fate; environment decides its quality. The argument from astronomy is disarming — every planet in the solar system was born at the same moment, and only one of them has life — and the conclusion cuts both ways against practitioners: a bazi cannot be used to adjust feng shui any more than an X-ray machine can be used to cure a disease.

Long-press the QR code to follow the account.

There are many essays from antiquity on the relation between feng shui and bazi, but their views come down to two: that the bazi decides fate, and that feng shui decides fate. Both are one-sided, because their authors are either in love with the bazi or infatuated with feng shui. In “Eight Principles of Fate Prediction” in Dili Qiuzhen no. 5 I already wrote that “the bazi decides the type of a person's fate” and “feng shui decides the quality of a person's fate.” But since that piece was about principles of prediction, it could not fully argue why the bazi decides the type. This essay fills the gap.

So far as we know, no living creature has been found on any planet in the solar system other than earth. Why not? Were those planets not all produced at the same moment — the big bang theory holds that they were? If they were all produced at that same moment, why is there life only on earth, and none on the moon, Venus or Jupiter? Scientists say: because only earth has an environment fit for life. Which shows plainly that the common moment of their production — time — is not the essential cause of life on earth. The essential cause is that earth has an environment fit for life. By the same logic, the fate of people born in the same moment is not decided by the birth time, the bazi, but by the birth environment: the ancestral grave and the home before and after birth.

On this very point, even the masters who hold that the bazi decides fate explain away their own failures by saying “the bazi is the same but the environment differs, so the fates diverge greatly.” That, plainly, is the bazi art's helpless, self-mocking excuse for its own inaccuracy. It shows that even the defenders of the “bazi decides fate” doctrine cannot make it consistent.

And if we look at the essence of the two, it can only be this: only when there is an ancestral grave configuration and energy capable of producing an official of division or provincial-ministerial rank does a person with a bazi marked for such rank get born; only when there is an ancestral grave with the configuration and energy of a short life does a person with a bazi marked for a short life get born. It absolutely cannot be the reverse — that because a person with a provincial-rank bazi was born, an ancestral grave of provincial-rank configuration and energy then appeared; still less that because a short-lived bazi was born, a short-lived grave appeared. That is putting the cart before the horse to the point of raving. To put it plainly, the bazi is only a representative symbol of the ancestral grave and the parents' home before the person's birth — a symbol and nothing more.

It is like the ordinary rule that women wear floral skirts and men go about shirtless in shorts. Floral skirts and shorts are only a rough surface symbol for distinguishing men from women — it is not that everyone in a floral skirt is a woman, nor that everyone shirtless in shorts is a man. Understand that, and the principled error of the “bazi decides fate” doctrine needs no further comment: it treats everyone in a floral skirt (everyone of the same sex born in the same hour) as a woman, and everyone in shorts as a man.

In analysing the essential relation between bazi and fate this way, I am not denying the predictive function of the bazi. I am injecting a sobering dose into a yixue world where “bazi prodigies” keep sprouting and, to enrich themselves, boast extravagantly about bazi prediction — one master in Shandong claims he can predict the moment of a person's death to the minute — ruining the future of yixue in the process.

To sum up: a person's fate is decided by environmental feng shui — the ancestral grave and home before and after birth. The bazi, a time factor, is only a representative symbol of the auspiciousness or otherwise of that prenatal feng shui. By observing and analysing that symbol one can predict a person's fate; that is not in dispute. But it is absolutely certain that the accuracy of such prediction is limited — because the bazi reflects only the feng shui before birth, and knows nothing of the changes in feng shui after birth. This “knowing the root but not the changes” accords neither with yixue principle nor with the eternal truth that things move and change.

At this point a bazi scholar may object: are not the luck cycle and the annual cycle changes? Yes, quite right. But those changes are exactly the same for everyone of the same sex born in the same hour. Are the changes in their ancestral graves and homes after birth also exactly the same as the luck and annual cycles? Absolutely not. Even twins of the same sex born in the same hour certainly do not have identical changes in their housing, and once grown to adulthood the changes cannot possibly be the same.

A further point: using bazi theory to adjust feng shui and avert disaster is even more absurd. The changing “heavenly timing” factor of the luck cycle and annual cycle does not act on a person directly; it acts indirectly, through the feng shui configuration before and after birth. For people whose chart and cycles are identical, if the direction in which their fate-energy is expressed is the same, then the essential nature of what happens in each annual and monthly period is absolutely the same (though what happens in each day and hour need not be, because the day and hour are too short a span to change a fate) — but the degree of good or bad is never the same. Using bazi theory to adjust feng shui is therefore absurd; if it occasionally works, it is a blind cat finding a dead mouse. The bazi is only a symbol for prediction, a floral skirt or a pair of shorts for telling men from women. With it you may make a general prediction of fate — the direction of a life, or of a year — but you absolutely cannot use it to judge absolute fate, the degree of wealth, rank, good or ill fortune, or length of life; and still less can you use it to adjust feng shui. Adjust feng shui by that symbol and you are giving a woman in shorts a sex change to become a man, and a man in a floral skirt (in Africa men wear skirts commonly) a sex change to become a woman; the result is neither male nor female, neither fish nor fowl — the opposite of what was wanted, and endlessly harmful. The bazi as a time factor is like the X-ray machine in a hospital: it can examine the health of the organs inside the body, but you absolutely cannot use an X-ray machine to cure disease. Adjusting feng shui by bazi theory is the same. Nor can the hexagram-and-line theory be used to adjust feng shui; even where an adjustment is made, it should be removed as soon as the event is over, and the long-term layout done by feng shui theory proper.

It should now be clear: “the bazi decides the type of a person's fate” means, in substance, “the feng shui environment before birth decides the type of a person's fate.” Understand that and you understand why people born under the same bazi have different fates, sometimes opposite ones. Because although the bazi is the same:

First: the ancestral grave and home feng shui of people born under one bazi, though broadly similar in configuration, differ utterly in the degree of auspicious or inauspicious energy. That degree decides the level of the quality of the fate, and that difference produces the divergence.

Second: even with the same configuration and the same quantity of energy, people born under one bazi differ because their birth order differs, and therefore the prenatal five-element qi they receive differs. On the effect of birth order, the American geneticist's article published in World Knowledge in 2002 confirmed it: birth order greatly affects a person's fate (here meaning only lifespan and health). In feng shui practice, in bazi practice, and in daily life there are quantities of direct examples proving that people born under the same bazi differ greatly in fate, sometimes oppositely. For twins of the same sex with vastly different fates, traditional bazi is helpless (the Lü-school bazi model theory solves five-fold coincidences perfectly), while feng shui solves it a hundred per cent.

Third: even with the same prenatal configuration, energy and birth order, people born under one bazi often diverge greatly because the changes in their feng shui after birth differ.

Fourth: even with all of the above identical, people of the same sex born under one bazi still diverge because the direction in which their fate-energy is expressed differs — one loves money, one loves office, one loves affairs, one loves idleness, one loves busyness. And if the direction of expression were the same for all of them, their fates would not differ at all.

In one sentence: feng shui decides a person's fate.

If you still have doubts, ask the bazi masters one last question: among babies of the same sex born in the same hour in the same hospital, why do some survive and grow up healthy while others are born disabled, and some die at birth? If it is not for one of these four reasons, how do you explain it?

Let me state clearly: I am not denying bazi prediction. I hold that its predictive function is limited and relative — coarse, directional — and by no means as miraculous as the masters boast, able to predict anything, down to the finest detail. Because to this day not one bazi master can genuinely state, flatly and certainly, in which year, month, day and hour you will catch a cold, and distinguish whether it is a cold from excess heat, a common chill, a gastric cold or a viral one; nor can any state in which year, month, day and hour, while you are cooking, several drops of oil at such and such a temperature will spatter the back of your hand at such and such a spot, and what the burn will come to. Among the nationally famous bazi masters I have met in recent years, very few can even give an accurate qualitative judgement of the four directions — wealth, office, injury, illness — for every single year of a life, let alone to the hour or the minute. As for what their advertisements say, I need not tell you. And if you still do not believe me, spend a few hundred or a few thousand yuan and have one of them read you; compare what you get with what the advertisement claims, and you will know whether what I say is true.

Hequ, Shanxi, April 2001