Telling the Ten Gods Apart in a Person’s Bazi

Translator's note. The position table that makes the previous essay usable. Each of the eight slots in a chart has a fixed occupant — father, mother, sibling, spouse, child, social standing — and whatever stem sits there wears that occupant's costume. A chart with no wealth star in the visible pillars can still belong to a billionaire, because the wealth star may be sitting, invisible, under the year stem. Two analogies carry the argument: seats in a lecture theatre, and a show of hands.

Telling the ten gods apart has two sides: the surface ten gods and the positioning ten gods. The surface ten gods are what we see in the written-out chart. The positioning ten gods are hidden beneath them, determined by position. The year stem, for instance, is the father's position, and the father is defined as the wealth star; so whatever the year stem appears to be — seal, parallel, officer — its positioning ten god is the wealth star. The year branch stands for the mother, so whatever it appears to be — officer, eating-and-wounding, parallel — its positioning ten god is the owl-seal. Whatever the month stem appears to be, its positioning ten god is the parallel. The month branch is the lover's position and stands for the lover: to a man, whatever it appears to be, its positioning ten god is the wealth star; to a woman, the officer-and-killer. To a man the day branch stands for the spouse, so whatever it appears to be, its positioning ten god is the wealth star; to a woman, the officer-and-killer, because the husband is the officer-and-killer. The hour stem stands for children — it is the children's position — and the eating-and-wounding stands for children; so even if the hour stem appears to be an owl-seal or an officer, that is only the surface: its positioning ten god is the eating-and-wounding. The hour branch stands for social standing, for your name and reputation; man or woman, its positioning ten god is the officer-and-killer.

Telling useful from unfavourable

In our system the standard for judging useful and unfavourable gods accords completely with objective fact. We do not, like traditional bazi, specialise in fine-sounding argument that reads beautifully on paper and has nothing to do with the way life actually works. Reading a fate is reading a person's life. If the logic of your reading is nothing like the logic of life, then either life is wrong or the reading is wrong — and it is certainly the reading.

So the standard is very simple: it is an election. What is an election? Numbers. A chart has eight seats and there are five elements. For the five elements to be balanced, no element may occupy more than 1.6 seats. If an element takes two seats, the others each lose half a seat; if it takes three, the others may have nowhere to sit. In other words, across eight seats, no element should exceed 1.6 — and anything past two characters is a bad character in your chart. Why? Because it is grabbing seats.

It is like this classroom. There are no spare seats: eighty-three of us, eighty-three seats. Then one man walks in and takes five. Do the others still have seats? They do not. So is the man who took five seats a good man or a bad one? Do you still need to ask whether he “obtained the season, the ground, the support, the force”? That is nonsense. If he can hold five seats, do you imagine he has no power? Would a man without power dare to seize five? The very fact that he holds five proves he has energy — a man without energy cannot hold five. And since he holds five, he is powerful, and therefore he is the bad one: to the elements left without seats, he is the bad one.

Do you, as a single person, actually need five woods? Do you not need metal, fire, water, earth? You need all of them. Only with all five are you a complete person. Now one element has seized every seat and the others are absent — you are incomplete. So for you, the stems and branches that seized the other elements' seats are the unfavourable gods. And you can see this plainly in any vote: the ordinary people have no particular power, but there are many of them raising hands, and the one with the most hands goes up. Which is to say: look at whom these people raise their hands for. Of the eight seats in a bazi, the seven neighbours decide whether the day stem is auspicious — they vote you in or they vote you out. Do you think a man who has seized the seats wants to hand you power? You are a day master of earth; why would five woods be willing to obey you? They will not obey one wu earth. Whatever you want to say or do, all five raise their hands against it. Are they your useful gods or your unfavourable ones? Think, and you will know.

Every theory of bazi prediction comes from life. Our theoretical technique matches exactly the relations and logic of life between people. So although our theory of useful and unfavourable gods looks very simple, and looks as though it could not be accurate, twenty years of practice have proved it a hundred per cent precise. In the original chart, any element whose stems and branches exceed two — that is, reach three or four — is an unfavourable god; one, or two, or none, is a useful god. That is in the original chart.

Once the luck cycle begins, three may also be treated as unfavourable, because many people cannot keep the distinction: they say that if three is unfavourable in the original chart, why does three remain unchanged in the luck cycle? So we changed it: in the luck cycle or the annual cycle, an element becomes unfavourable when its stems and branches reach four. If the chart has two and the luck cycle adds one, three is still unfavourable; if the original chart has three and the luck cycle adds no wood, then those three are not called unfavourable during that cycle. If the original chart has three woods and the luck cycle has none, then throughout the ten years of that woodless cycle the three woods in the chart are useful gods. Keep this distinction clear.

In the annual cycle: if the original chart has two, the luck cycle one and the annual cycle one, that element has become an unfavourable element. Pay particular attention to this.

So in studying our theory you must be clear about the ten gods in a bazi: what the surface ten gods are, what the positioning ten gods are, and where the positioning ten gods sit. A person may have no wealth star anywhere in the chart and never meet a wealth star in any luck cycle, and still be a billionaire. Many ask how a man can be rich without a wealth star. I ask how you can tell from a man's clothes whether he is alive or dead. Do you imagine that everyone wearing clothes is alive and everyone without them is dead? Have you not noticed that at night most people are wearing nothing, and are still very much alive? So if you read only the surface ten gods, announce that “this chart has no wealth star,” and tell the man his finances are poor, you have shown that you do not understand bazi prediction at all — because there is a positioning wealth star.

Take a chart with no wealth star where the person himself is wu earth. Beneath wu earth the positioning wealth star is zi water. Suppose this person works his whole life in the zi direction: he is from Guangzhou and works his whole life in Beijing. Do you think he is poor? He never once meets a renzi or guihai luck cycle, and he can still make a great fortune. Add strong auspicious sand in the zi direction at his home and he may well be enormously rich.

So if you judge a person's prospects purely by the absence of some surface ten god, you will not read accurately at all. The surface ten gods are the clothes a person wears; the positioning ten gods are his body. To judge whether a body is genuinely healthy, you cannot tell from the clothes — you have to undress and examine it. In a hospital, seeing a man in a hospital gown, can you say he is not ill? A man in a hospital gown certainly is ill; no need to undress him. But if a woman disguises herself as a man to get in, the clothes will not show it and you must undress her to find out.

So where the surface ten gods suffice, there is no need to look at the positioning ones. Where the surface ten gods cannot show the direction of a fate — where you cannot see promotion or wealth in them — then look at the positioning ten gods. If the positioning ten gods are excellent, and the person moves in the right direction, and his feng shui fully supports the positioning ten gods, then his wealth and rank will be far greater than that of a man with the surface ten god. This is why you cannot take a bazi alone and say whether the man will be rich or promoted. You may object that people born under the same bazi have the same positioning ten gods. They do. But why do we look at them? To see where the person moves. In which direction of his ancestral grave does this man work and live? In which direction does he go to work every day? Is the direction of the positioning ten god at his ancestral grave auspicious or not? Through time, direction and environment we can divide the fates of people born under one bazi with complete accuracy.

Everyone must have some grasp of our bazi theory, because the positioning ten gods are indispensable when applying the 290 configurations — and in resolving major illnesses such as liver or lung cancer, or major disasters such as imprisonment, the positioning ten gods may matter far more than the surface ones. So learn the basics. Whether you can read a fate is beside the point; understand what I have said about the nature of time and direction, and about the auspicious and inauspicious qualities of sand and water in the twenty-four mountain directions of the eight palaces, and you will study the 290 configurations without obstruction.