Five Notes on Resolving Disaster

Translator's note. The right place to start with this layer, because it is mostly a warning against the layer itself. Five notes on what “resolving a disaster” can and cannot be: accurate reading first, then a method, then enough energy in the remedy to matter — and most of the remedies on the market fail the third test. There is a documented experiment in the middle: 280 letters, all warned of a car crash in the same year, of which 38 had a sprain and one broke an arm. The rest is an argument that a charm cannot outweigh a motorway.

Every client and every reader, in every age, has gone looking for the magic that would cancel a disaster outright. None has found it. In recent years the field has been thick with famous names trading “methods” under the banners of ancestral transmission, secret transmission, a monk's transmission, a Daoist's transmission, or science of their own invention — and enthusiasts who did not know better carried those methods out and used them on clients. The toad jumps the threshold and bruises both its backside and its face.

So: the nature of “resolving disaster,” set out again, for those who want to argue with it.

1. The foundation is an accurate reading

Only an accurate reading allows a remedy to be designed to fit the disaster. And accuracy is very hard to demonstrate. Different readers have different specialisms — one is good on relatives, one on wealth and office, one on illness and injury. No reader is good on everything, and accurate on everything. So if you decide a man's reading is trustworthy because he correctly told you how many brothers you have, or which parent died first — matters that do not touch the actual pain of a life — and on that basis accept his verdict that you face disaster, you have made yourself entirely available to be cheated.

That is the opening the “immortals” and “masters” walk through.

In Hainan, two masters; in Shandong, one prodigy: whoever sat down in front of them was told there would be a car crash. Terrified enthusiasts paid up and had it resolved. In the single renwu year I received close to 280 letters from students of the field, every one of them reporting that a car crash had been predicted. When the first month of guiwei ended, all of them wrote or telephoned to report on the year. Thirty-eight had sprained something or cut themselves slightly. One had come off a motorcycle and broken an arm. The other two hundred and forty had had no injury of any kind.

Set aside simple inaccuracy. The car-crash line exists to sell the resolution. These masters can see perfectly well that your renwu year is a year of great gain and high office; they tell you instead that nothing will go right and disasters are massing, then charge you to fix it. When the year passes well, with no disaster, you are now convinced of their skill. They have taken your money and your respect at once. Why would they not?

And the methods they sell are these: talismans, incantations, turning the bed to face another way, wearing a particular colour, clearing a particular direction, installing a “house heart,” making offerings to Buddhas and bodhisattvas, burying a suppressing object, hanging a huasha mirror, stone lions, crystal ornaments, a stone inscribed “Mount Tai stone wards off all,” sending ghosts and gods away, performing rites, giving alms, building bridges and mending roads as good works, arranging eight-trigram formations. Every one of these has been tested by history and found to do very little — mostly because the energy involved is nowhere near enough to cancel a disaster that carries real energy.

The rule “resolve a disaster if there is one, do nothing if there is not” has ceased to mean anything to most of these masters. Which is why, from antiquity to now, those who practise divination, medicine and the yi have so often been men whose own lives were a tangle of calamity and who left no descendants.

A practitioner should understand: de — virtue, integrity — is the great accumulation of the universe's positive energy. It is like air: an energy every person requires. Without air no one survives; and without the common field of de, no individual survives either. No de, no positive energy. No positive energy, calamity without end.

2. The essence is the method

You have read a disaster; how to resolve it is the substance. But every method on the market is a dependent of the reading system that produced it, and different systems produce different remedies — and the remedies contradict each other.

Take a case. By the hexagram method, the east ought to be strengthened in wood. By the four pillars, the east ought to be reduced in wood. The client does not know which way to turn, and neither, honestly, does the reader.

So the received remedies have to be analysed at the level of what they actually are.

Having worked through the essential principles of the hexagram method, the four pillars and feng shui, my conclusion is this: the disaster a hexagram or a four-pillar chart predicts, and the disaster feng shui predicts, are the same disaster, with no difference at all. But because the instruments differ — the way of examining the body differs — the treatments built on those instruments differ in kind.

A hexagram reading and a four-pillar reading are an X-ray machine and a CT scanner. They diagnose. They do not treat. Therefore any remedy derived from four-pillar or hexagram theory works like a course of antibiotics for an epidemic: once the illness is gone, the medicine must stop. Keep taking it for months or years and you produce a new disease.

Which is to say: resolving by hexagram or four-pillar theory is not impossible, but it must be done on this condition — the moment the disaster is resolved, stop. Continue, and you generate a fresh one.

A remedy derived from feng shui, by contrast, adjusts at the level of the constitution. It is like breathing exercises, dietary therapy, fresh air, physical training: it can be kept up for life. (Understand that feng shui decides a person's fate, and this follows.) In short: after feng shui adjustment the configuration can stand for life; after hexagram or four-pillar adjustment, once the matter is settled, dismantle it and return to the permanent feng shui configuration.

3. Accurate reading plus correct method — is the disaster then resolved?

No.

First, it must be done in advance. As with illness, prevention is the effective thing. Once the disaster has happened, or has advanced to a late stage, resolution becomes extremely difficult.

Second, even beforehand, the remedy must reach a certain level of energy. It is not enough to bring in some object that carries little or none. Preventing illness is not achieved by smelling the medicine; the dose must be enough.

In practice: talismans and incantations have a psychological effect only. They work on illness that is psychogenic in origin. They do essentially nothing about accidental injury, loss of money, or trouble with the authorities. If a talisman carried energy, then a man who wore one all his life and recited its incantation all his life would have no disasters at all. But the monks in the temples and the priests in the monasteries do not escape disaster either. That settles the question of talismans.

As for turning the headboard, wearing colours, installing Buddha images, adopting a child of another surname, changing your name, hanging a huasha mirror, burying suppressing objects, arranging eight-trigram formations: objectively, some may have a small effect. None of them will cure the disease on contact and turn disaster into fortune. Their energy is simply too small to block or drain the energy of the offending object. A remedy works visibly only when the energy of the object used is greater than or equal to the energy of the disaster.

The masters' claim of “four ounces moving a thousand catties” is nonsense and does not survive testing. A trunk road runs straight at your house or your ancestral grave, delivering wind, exhaust and noise along its axis. Will hanging one mirror, or writing “Mount Tai stone wards off all” on a slab, resolve that? A million-volt transformer sits in front of the house, broadcasting its field into your rooms. Will a stone lion and a paper charm resolve that?

No more needs saying. Some disasters can be resolved and some cannot; not all of them can. Whether a given one can be resolved depends on three things: the reading, the plan, and the energy of the object used.

4. The best method is conversion of energy

See “The Five Principles of Disaster Resolution.” Conversion is simple, quick, and works remarkably well.

An example. A year hexagram shows the guangui — the officer-ghost — holding the ruling position. On the traditional reading this is excellent for a man already in office, and for a commoner with no post it means: when the officer-ghost holds the world, there is no peace; if you do not fall ill you meet the authorities; goods and money are constantly lost.

How is that resolved?

By the conversion principle: the officer-ghost governs calamity, and it also governs career, work and the pressure of living. Its energy is fixed, not unlimited. If more of it is spent on career, on work, on the pressure of striving, less of it is available to express as disaster.

So the advice to the commoner in that year is: open a new undertaking. Set a goal different from any you have pursued, and work at it hard. The disaster of the officer-ghost holding the world is not merely resolved; it is converted into advantage. (The detailed adjustment must be read from the whole hexagram — the officer-ghost alone does not decide it.)

The conversion principle is not merely sound in theory. It has held up in practice.

5. Two asides

Burying a barrel of water. Some masters, when a site needs water, have the client bury a large iron barrel filled with water. This is actively harmful. If the barrel is sealed, no vapour escapes, and without vapour it is not water but strong sand. If it is unsealed, how long does one barrel of water last, and how much energy does it carry? Even kept full permanently, the energy is tiny. And on some terrain it readily produces the “opposite palace, same water” configuration within the local frame — which is very bad indeed.

Crystal is not water. A master will tell you crystal is of the water element. It is a mineral, and minerals are earth. If crystal were water, then every gemstone would be water, and by the same reasoning glass would be water, and sandstone (which contains quartz) would be water, and brick and cement would be water. The absurdity is complete.

Taiyuan Normal College, August 2003