The Most Scientific Way to Determine the Useful and Unfavourable Gods

Translator's note. The most consequential methodological essay in the Bazi corpus, and the one that departs furthest from the classical tradition. The useful god is not found by season, root or support; it is found by arithmetic. An element appearing once or twice is useful; three or more is harmful; the threshold rises by one at each finer time scale. Two identical stems count as 1.6. On this basis Lü dismantles wangshuai judgement, seasonal adjustment, following structures, “joyous gods” — and the idea that a person's own chart has a strength at all.

Different schools of bazi judge the useful and unfavourable gods differently. Theories for selecting the useful god proliferate, and there is no unified standard.

I hold that there is only one standard for judging useful and unfavourable gods: the element that acts beneficially on me is the useful god; the element that acts harmfully on me is the unfavourable god. What matters is the magnitude of that element's force.

How do we know which element acts beneficially and which harmfully? There is a logical relation here. A four-pillar chart has only eight positions, but in terms of the five elements there are only five. If a person's fate were very good, those five elements should be distributed evenly across the eight positions — 1.6 positions each — and that would be the most balanced chart. But we find that the five elements are not evenly distributed in any chart, which creates the problem that “when one element is too many, the others are too few.” If fire is excessive, the others are scarce, or even absent. A missing element causes imbalance, and too little of an element is no good either. It is like going to war: a rifle without bullets, or bullets without a rifle, are equally useless — neither protects you nor kills the enemy.

1. Judging useful and unfavourable gods in the original chart

(1) In the original chart, when the number of stems and branches of any one element is one or two, that element is the useful god. When the number reaches three or more, that element is the unfavourable god.

(2) An element absent from the original chart is a useful god — but if it never appears, it is of no use.

First question. When an element appears twice, it occupies only 0.4 of someone else's position. When it appears three times, it occupies 1.4 of someone else's positions, and it begins to harm others' interests. So the distinction between useful and unfavourable is very simple, and you will find that gods divided this way are extremely accurate in practice.

The traditional method — distinguishing by “obtaining the season” (metal born in a metal month), “obtaining the ground” (metal sitting on earth), “obtaining the force” (parallel-and-rob supporting the body) — does not survive logical scrutiny. That theoretical system rests on thinking like “jia wood is a towering tree, yi wood is a flower, bing fire is the sun.” But a bazi cannot be read by that system. What matters is how much of the primordial life-force a person actually obtained, and in what direction that energy was finally expressed. Eat a bowl of rice: one person uses its energy to study, one to play games on his phone, one to carry bricks at a building site for a hundred yuan, and one, with nothing better to do, to tease a cobra — which bites his finger, and the finger is amputated at the hospital. The traditional division of useful and unfavourable gods is essentially meaningless. When the common people rise with hoes and spears in rebellion, does the emperor's authority help? It does not. That is to say: once our numbers reach a certain level, whether or not I obtain the season, whether or not I obtain the ground, whether or not I obtain the force, I can make myself king under heaven. When Chao Gai and six others first robbed the birthday gifts, the court pursued them and they had no choice but to go up Liangshan, because their force was too small to resist. Once the hundred and eight heroes had gathered on Liangshan, did they still fear the court? They beat the court's armies again and again. Another way to see it: not every member of the Politburo Standing Committee obtained the season and the ground, but each of them occupies a seat, and each has a vote. If the general secretary wants a policy passed and six members will not raise their hands, it does not pass. Which shows that number is a heaven-granted advantage in a chart.

As for strength and weakness — what meaning do you think it has for your own original chart? Strong, you live to eighty; weak, you live to eighty. Strong, it is still you; weak, it is still you. Do you think judging strength is still necessary? Judging strength makes sense only when two different charts are compared. If you are the only person in the world, on what basis do you judge whether you are rich or poor? Alone, with one cent, you could say you are the richest man alive; with a trillion, you could call yourself a pauper. Number, and therefore strength, has meaning only in comparison with others. Have you not noticed what a humorous body of thought traditional fate studies is? Faced with a single chart, it talks about strong and weak — what use is your strength or weakness? Strong, this person is alive; weak, this person is alive. Strong, this person is dead; weak, this person is dead. Doing strength and weakness inside one's own chart is a joke. And using strength and weakness to find the useful god is a bigger joke. That is my view; you may treat it as heresy and ignore it.

Personally I hold that strength and weakness should be discussed — but not by comparing the chart with itself. So long as the person is alive, strength need not be discussed.

Someone may say that when reading annual cycles you need to look at strength. If strength or weakness is needed only when reading annual cycles, to judge the auspicious or inauspicious outcome, then what use is looking at it in the original chart? Why not look directly at the annual cycle's strength? That is our logical inference. Many habits of thought in traditional fate studies form a closed system that explains itself.

So, is there any use in looking at strength?

There is. Precisely because traditional fate studies talk about strength endlessly, it has a concept of “the useful god changing” — last year fire was the useful god, this year earth is, next year wood is. If the useful god changes like that, why look for one in the original chart at all? And if the original chart needs no useful god, what use is analysing its strength? Many statements in traditional fate studies contradict themselves.

I came out of traditional fate studies myself. At first I too believed in “seasonal adjustment” — add a little fire in winter, a little water in summer. Give a polar bear a little warming and it dies of the adjustment; give a tropical fish a little ice and it dies too. For anyone born under any bazi, so long as the person is alive and not dead, it proves he has already adapted to the state in which metal, wood, water, fire and earth exist in his chart.

In fate prediction there is a “principle of fate adaptation.” Leave that principle out and accuracy becomes very difficult.

Second question: an element absent from the original chart is a useful god, but if it never appears it is of no use.

An element absent from the chart may well appear in the luck cycle. If it does not appear in the luck cycle it will appear in the annual, monthly, daily or hourly cycle. This is why a person with no officer star in his chart can become a great official, and a person with no wealth star can make a great fortune. From this you should understand that what is absent from the chart does not mean it will be absent from the person's life.

Which brings up another term: what people call the “following structure.”

The theory of following structures is also wrong. The original chart follows, but the luck cycle will not let it follow; the luck cycle follows, but the annual cycle will not; the annual follows, the month will not; the month follows, the day will not; the day follows, the hour will not. Take a person's life at thirty-six thousand days: for a chart that is supposed to be a following structure, the days on which it genuinely follows do not add up to five hundred. Do you still think your chart's following structure matters? It has no meaning whatsoever.

When we read a fate we are not reading the original chart, and not really the luck cycle either; we are reading the annual cycle, or the month, or the day. Most prediction is done by year, because most matters cannot be settled in a few days. Something settled within a day is read by day; something that takes years or decades needs the luck cycle; something settled within a year or two is read by year; something settled within one year can be read by month — a farmer reading a year's harvest, for instance.

Reading the original chart gives only an image. Setting aside everything else: on the time system alone, truly predicting a person's fate requires the luck cycle, and before a luck cycle has ended — even if only half a year remains — you cannot say you read it correctly. Only when the cycle is over can you say whether you were right or wrong. The lid goes on the coffin. Some people commit suicide or go bankrupt two months before the cycle ends. The same with annual cycles: only when the year is over can you judge. Before the luck cycle or the year is over, every judgement may be wrong. A person does not live by his original chart; a person lives day by day.

So the so-called following structure, whether following strength or following weakness, has no substantive meaning at all. Take a car: today you see a flat tyre, tomorrow a new tyre is fitted and it drives to Beijing as usual. Did it “follow”? This theory arose because its authors did not know what the stems and branches are, did not understand what a bazi essentially is. It is judging whether a person is ill, has a cold, has cancer, is a man, is a woman, is a doctor, is a graduate student, is rich, is a pauper — by the colour of his clothes and the length of his hair. It judges essence from the outer system, and so its uncertainty is enormous.

There are also “joyous gods” and “enemy gods.” Turn it around: suppose earth is the useful god and metal is the unfavourable god. I tell you, when earth arrives nothing good happens either — earth generates metal. The useful god arrives and does harm by helping. Do friends not sometimes help you into disaster? If your good friend had not lent you a million last year, you would not have lost it, would not have been trapped in the stock market and reduced to poverty, would not have become his enemy, would not have killed anyone, would not have jumped from a building. Precisely because a good friend lent you a million, you were ruined. That friend is the earth: outwardly kind to you, in reality bringing you the catastrophic force of metal. Do you still think a joyous god is useful? Very often the useful god arrives and instead of bringing good brings disaster, because the useful god has gone to help the unfavourable one. This holds even if you have classified useful and unfavourable correctly. To a child, the parents are the useful god; if the parents do not spoil the child, the child will not develop into someone who hits and curses people and ends up killing.

The method of judging useful and unfavourable gods is in fact very simple: judge by quantity. The same applies in the body. If you lack zinc and someone feeds you more zinc than food, you will soon die. Our method accords both with the logic of human affairs and with scientific principle. Balance must be maintained for anything to be normal.

Much of traditional fate studies does not accord with objective reality and does not survive the test of practice.

The legendary bazi of Guan Yu is Bingwu, Bingwu, Bingwu, Bingwu. (Note: four bingwu pillars cannot in fact occur; four wuwu pillars can. The example is for illustration.) How do we select the useful god?

Every stem and branch in that chart is an unfavourable god. But as we have said, being an unfavourable god is not in itself frightening; what matters is whether those unfavourable gods are active. Surround yourself with thugs, but if none of them harms you, you will be fine. Surround yourself with useful gods, but if none of them helps you, you will not be much better off.

A chart with only one element, such as Guihai, Guihai, Guihai, Guihai — this is not a “special chart” either. The Ditian Sui has a whole passage on how to read such a fate. I tell you: when Ren Tieqiao wrote that book he was guessing. He had never met a person with four fires; he imagined how such a chart ought to be read, and in fact he could not read it. Setting aside whether Guan Yu's bazi really was four bingwu: even if it was, could it be that on that day, in that hour, Guan Yu was the only person born in the whole world? Absolutely not. A donkey would have dropped a foal or two; a fly or a mosquito would have hatched a few. Why were they not Guan Yu? Which is to say: among the people born in that hour, some actualised the energy of certain stems and branches in the chart, and some did not.

How do we judge whether the energy of a stem or branch has been actualised? By the person's bodily features. And the direction in which fate-energy is expressed need not be the same even for people born under one chart. When we say two faces are alike we mean roughly alike. There are no two identical leaves in the world, let alone two identical people. That is the basic idea of the bazi model: see which stem and which branch have functioned, and which have not.

2. Judging useful and unfavourable gods during a luck cycle

Once the luck cycle begins, when the number of stems and branches of the same element is four or more, that element is treated as the unfavourable god. In judging, two identical stems, or two identical branches, count as 1.6.

3. Judging during an annual cycle

Once the annual cycle begins, when the number of stems and branches of the same element is four or more, that element is treated as the unfavourable god. In judging, two identical stems, or two identical branches, count as 1.6.

In the original chart or once the annual cycle begins, if two jia woods appear, treat the two as 1.6 jia woods. The same for every other stem and branch: two yin woods count as 1.6 yin woods, two chen earths as 1.6 chen earths.

Suppose the chart contains “Jiayin, Yimao.” The danger it brings you is many times greater than that of “two jia woods, one mao wood, one yin wood.” On the surface, wood is the unfavourable god in both. But the difference in outcome is enormous: the combination “Jiayin, Yimao” brings you absolute risk; the combination “jia, jia, yin, mao” brings you walking along the edge of risk. “Standing by the river, in danger of falling in” and “already in the river” differ enormously. “At risk of being arrested” and “already arrested” differ enormously. “At risk of being cheated out of thirty million” and “already cheated out of three million” differ enormously.

So counting is a surface matter; when counting we must look at how strong the force of a given stem actually is. Why is the force of identical stems smaller? If a chart has two jia woods, it is like occupying two seats in a library and running back and forth between them: you inconvenience others, but the seat you have left empty someone else can sit in. If two people sit in those two seats, nobody else can. A person may occupy several positions, but in fact he can only occupy one; the others are half occupied at most. Put it another way: you are the greatest martial artist under heaven, the Fire-Water Evil God. If you fight in Guangzhou I may fear you, but in Beijing I do not — unless you come to Beijing. The Fire-Water Evil God has influence over Beijing, but while he is not there the Beijing martial world does not much fear him.

The number of a given element is a surface phenomenon, but in substance a large number means large energy. Our standard for judging useful and unfavourable gods is the size of a thing's power, and its power depends on how many it is. Countless ants can strip an elephant to the bone.

[Editor's note: the original text here contains a lengthy curse against plagiarists of the author's work. It has been omitted; the substance of the preceding argument is unaffected.]

The method for judging useful and unfavourable gods cannot be the traditional one of obtaining the season, the ground and the time. What does it matter how well a single ant obtains the season, the ground and the time? That is not a rational view but a purely philosophical one. Philosophical thought is not the same as applied technique. You cannot build an atomic bomb without Einstein's theory, but Einstein could not build an atomic bomb. A philosophy alone does not become a technique.

4. Judging during a monthly cycle

Once the monthly cycle begins, when the number of stems and branches of the same element is five or more, that element is treated as the unfavourable god. In judging, two identical stems, or two identical branches, count as 1.6.

5. Judging during a daily cycle

Once the daily cycle begins, when the number of stems and branches of the same element is six or more, that element is treated as the unfavourable god. In judging, two identical stems, or two identical branches, count as 1.6.

6. Judging during an hourly cycle

Once the hourly cycle begins, when the number of stems and branches of the same element is seven or more, that element is treated as the unfavourable god. In judging, two identical stems, or two identical branches, count as 1.6.