Mount Wudang: A Discussion of Time, Space and Person

Translator's note. A long set piece from Mount Wudang in 2011, and the clearest statement of what the method is for. A Taoist abbot strokes the back of his own hand; from the direction of the gesture Lü dates an event, from the body part he names it, and from the smallness of the motion he sizes it — fifty yuan of phone credit. Then the reasoning runs backwards: what must the abbot have placed, where, and at what hour, for this to happen? He remembers. The lesson drawn is that no gesture is voluntary, and that this is therefore a technique not only for reading a fate but for arranging one. (The original repeats its second half verbatim; that repetition is omitted here.)

Wudang Shan, the foremost mountain of Taoism.

Its Taoist culture is vast and deep, of immense antiquity. It is not counted among the five sacred peaks, yet it is honoured as the Great Mountain and called “a wonder without equal since the beginning of time, the first immortal mountain under heaven” — with its mysterious, empty, numinous fairyland, its arcane and drifting martial art, and a culture that may be called the soul of China. It was the imperial altar through successive dynasties.

On 14 April 2011 (a jihai day) I arrived at the Zixiao Palace on Wudang Shan in Shiyan, Hubei. On the morning of the 15th, a gengzi day, accompanied by Chairman Yang of the Wudang Taoist Association, I went to the Qiongtai Middle Abbey below the Golden Summit. There Abbot Rao, director of the abbey's management committee, received us warmly, and host and guests talked in high good humour.

In the course of the conversation about Wudang Taoist culture we came to yin-yang and the five phases, and to fortune-telling, divination and feng shui — the traditional arts of China. When we reached the relation between yin-yang and the five phases and the various aspects of a human life, I set out for the several abbots present, all deep students of Wudang culture, the theory of the relation among time, space and person. One of them asked me to illustrate its subtle use with a concrete case.

At that moment Abbot Rao was sitting opposite me — I facing southwest, he facing northeast — and he was gently stroking the back of one hand with the other. Nothing moves without a cause; nothing moves without a consequence. By the theory of time, space and person, taking Abbot Rao himself as the centre, his stroking of the back of his hand occurred due west of him, which is the you direction. From the relation between time and person I inferred: on a you day — that is, the 12th of this month — something would happen to him. What kind of thing? From the relation between person and space I inferred: the hand is the tool most closely connected with oneself, and this tool moved in the you direction of space; therefore on the 12th something occurred involving the maintenance, servicing or repair of an important tool he uses. Abbot Rao recalled that his important tool was the ritual implement used in Taoist ceremonies — but that day there had been no ceremony, and he had not touched the implement. The abbots present were puzzling over it when Rao suddenly remembered: on the evening of the 11th his phone had run out of credit and been cut off, and on the 12th he had gone and paid to have it reconnected. The phone was his important tool.

From the smallness of the motion I inferred that the sum paid on the 12th was not large — a few tens of yuan, not hundreds or thousands. Abbot Rao said: fifty yuan.

Interest rose sharply, because two of those present were themselves deep students of fortune-telling, divination and feng shui, and they pressed me to go further. I inferred, from the relation between person and space, that on the 11th Abbot Rao must have placed a solid object of no great energy in the you direction, or south-by-southwest, from the centre of his bed. Rao remembered: an implement brought up from the foot of the mountain, placed south-by-southwest.

Because the 12th was a dingyou day, the object had to have been placed in those two directions — ding and you — some time before the 12th for the event to occur on the 12th. Why did I infer a yang object rather than a yin one? From the relation between space and time: only if a yang object had been placed in the ding and you directions would the dingyou day bring spending and loss rather than income. With a yin object, the 12th would have brought money in, not money out.

Then, from the relation between time and space, I further inferred that the object must have been placed in the ding direction on the 11th, during the guisi hour (9 to 11 in the morning) or the dingyou hour (5 to 7 in the evening). Rao remembered: he had not stayed at the abbey on the night of the 10th but down the mountain, and had come back on the morning of the 11th — the si hour — and casually put the thing down opposite his bed, in the ding direction.

The abbots and Chairman Yang all exclaimed at once: “Extraordinary!”

At their warm invitation I summed up the theory of time, space and person:

1. The theory is not only for prediction, accurate as that is. More important is what prediction shows us: nothing that happens to a person happens because he wanted it to, nor fails to happen because he did not want it. Everything that happens happens after a person has received energy from something outside himself; it is when the energy of external things affects his own energy that fortunate or unfortunate events occur to him. Abbot Rao paid out money on the 12th to maintain an important tool, his phone, because on the morning of the 11th, in the si hour, he placed a yang object carrying energy in the ding direction of his bed. It was precisely the energy of that object in that direction that changed his own auspicious and inauspicious energy, and produced an outflow rather than an inflow.

So a person's promotion and wealth, his dismissal and death, are all results produced when his own energy is changed by the energy of the things around him. Put an auspicious thing in an auspicious direction at an auspicious time, near a person or at his ancestral grave, and at a fixed time something auspicious will certainly happen to him — promotion, income. Put an inauspicious thing in an inauspicious direction at an inauspicious time, and at a fixed time something inauspicious will certainly happen — dismissal, loss.

So the real use of the time-space-person theory is this: by means of objects that carry energy, to change a fate in a chosen direction — and not merely to enjoy the marvel of predicting it.

Master this skill and at the critical moment you can use a particular object to settle everything for yourself and create every favourable condition.

2. What the abbots could not understand was the connection between Rao's stroking the back of his own hand and his placing a yang object in the ding direction in the si hour of the 11th.

Nothing moves unless it has first received a great force. Precisely because Rao placed a yang object in the ding direction in the si hour of the 11th, the energy of that object acted on him, and that force expressed itself through his movements. We might think: stroking the back of one's hand is a casual gesture — how can there be so much to say about it? But the fact is: why did you not casually touch your nose, your ear, your face? Why the back of the hand, precisely? Because at that moment, only stroking the back of the hand felt comfortable and pleasant. And why did only that feel comfortable at that moment? Because at that moment an external force was driving you, and only by following the direction and manner of that force would you feel comfortable — resist it and you feel acute pain.

Where does that external force come from? It is the energy of the object in the ding direction in the si hour of the 11th, which set off a change in Rao's own energy and produced a particular mode of expressing it.

So: no gesture of any person is accidental or arbitrary, and nothing happens without that person having, at a particular time, received the energy of a particular yin or yang thing in a particular direction.

Understand this, master the skill, and you can change your own affairs and other people's by placing particular yin and yang things in particular directions at particular times. Yang can benefit you; yin can subdue others.

Having unlocked the relation among time, space and person, everyone who masters it can, within the level of fate quality he was born with, go everywhere without defeat, and reach the very summit of his own level.

How high a person's level of fate quality is can be assessed accurately from the distribution and energy of yin and yang things inside and outside the house where his mother lived for most of her pregnancy, and at the ancestral grave.

The abbots pressed me to stay several more days. Business called; I could leave only a yearning for Wudang Shan, and a feeling of deep respect for the Taoists of Wudang.