What Is the Only Standard for Testing a Bazi Theory?

Translator's note. A scorecard. Three older explanations of the identical-chart problem are taken up in turn and dismissed — the “seasonal adjustment” story via a famous Qing anecdote about a minister and a blacksmith born in the same hour, Shao Weihua's rule about elder and younger twins, and Li Hanchen's four differences. Then the sharper move: the accuracy claimed by the trade is decomposed into theory, cold reading, and betting on the odds. The standard proposed is brutal and simple: rank ten thousand people born under one chart.

Whatever the school, only accuracy can prove a theory scientific. A predictive theory that has been handed down for centuries or a thousand years is worthless if it is not accurate, or only slightly accurate.

The only standard for testing a bazi theory: can it distinguish the differing fates of five-fold and six-fold coincidences?

A five-fold coincidence means born in the same year, month, day and hour, and of the same sex. A six-fold coincidence adds the same parents. Five-fold and six-fold coincidences exist objectively and cannot be avoided.

Several theories for distinguishing their fates have appeared over the centuries:

1. The theory of seasonal adjustment of the useful god.

Shi Yizhi, a Qing grand secretary, had a father who was thoroughly versed in Ziping fortune-telling. In the xinyou year of Kangxi (1681) the father took the whole family to the capital. Midway, their boat stopped at a wharf, and Yizhi was born there. The father cast the bazi and concluded that the boy would certainly enjoy great wealth and rank. That day the river wind was strong and the boat could not proceed. The father went ashore for a walk and happened on a blacksmith's household where a boy had also just been born. He asked the birth hour; it was exactly the same as Yizhi's. The father quietly noted the address.

More than twenty years later Yizhi had risen to imperial commissioner. His father, retired, passed through the place where Yizhi was born and found that the boy born in the same hour was at home swinging a hammer at the forge. The old man was overcome. He could not sleep all night, turning it over, and then it came to him. He said to himself: “This chart has rather too much fire and lacks the water that would control it. The one born on the boat had the river water to check the fire. The one born beside the forge had fire added to fire, with nothing to adjust it. So the blacksmith's son's poverty and meanness were fated too.”

This reading sounds reasonable. But sit down and think about it. The chart needs water — but is there not a great deal of water in a river? Can too much water not drown a man? Thirsty as you are, hold your head under the pond and you drown. And a man dying of thirst in the desert: will one drop save him?

Which brings in the question of quantity. Even if you select the useful god correctly, you need to know how much of it. Without quantity, the useful god can arrive and still bring disaster: if water is the useful god in your chart, in a renzi luck cycle with a renzi annual cycle — cycle and year coinciding — you still meet disaster. It is like taking cold medicine. Take two bowls of it as your meal and the cold is cured and the man is dead. Take a tiny bit and the cold is not cured at all. This is what the ancients and every present school have never understood. Dig into some of the old theories and they are absurd.

2. Shao Weihua's rule: of twins born to one mother, on a yang day in a yang hour the elder prevails over the younger; on a yin day in a yin hour the younger prevails over the elder.

This explanation of twins is also absurd and does not survive practice at all.

3. Li Hanchen's explanation of the differing fates of five-fold and six-fold coincidences:

(1) Different family origins. (2) Different ambitions. (3) Different feng shui environments. (4) Different education.

Li Hanchen's explanation looks very reasonable on the surface — except that Li Hanchen also said that from one bazi he could tell: (1) the family circumstances; (2) what your ambitions are; (3) what the feng shui of your home is; (4) what your education is.

His theory contradicts itself front and back, and many students across the country have been taken in by it.

Well, then: can feng shui itself separate the fates of five-fold and six-fold coincidences? It can. The problem is that if fifteen hundred people born under the same chart came to you from all over the country, would you have time to inspect all their ancestral graves and homes? They came to have their fortunes read, not to have their feng shui inspected. If you are so capable, then reason backwards and tell me what my home's feng shui is. And if seeing the feng shui tells you the person's fate, what need is there to read the bazi at all? It would be superfluous.

From antiquity to the present, no one and no theory has genuinely explained the differing fates of five-fold and six-fold coincidences. Every bazi theory in history hovers between accuracy and inaccuracy: each has some accuracy, none attains precision. We do not ask you to predict how many white hairs a man has. Even for a basic qualitative judgement of auspicious and inauspicious, the accuracy of traditional theory is only twenty to thirty per cent.

Some believe their own accuracy is sixty to seventy per cent. In fact that figure rests on:

(1) twenty to thirty per cent derived from theory; (2) twenty to thirty per cent from reading faces; (3) ten to twenty per cent from betting on the odds.

So with cold reading and a bet on the odds, and no predictive theory at all, a man can get fifty to sixty per cent right — and if he is clever, seventy to eighty. See a man in filthy clothes collecting scrap, and you can tell him: your life has been full of reversals, you are a man of hardship, and up to now you have not been rich. Do you need his bazi for that? Add a bet on the odds: say he ought to have a son. If he has none, no harm; if he does, you were right. Your accuracy goes up again. Chat with him and find he is thoughtful and has strong opinions, and you can add that his marriage is bad — because a thoughtful, opinionated, stubborn man generally will not defer to anyone, and unless his wife is entirely without opinions she will quarrel with him.

The accuracy of the old hands comes not from correct theory but from cold reading, knowledge of social life, and psychological analysis.

Take predicting the year a man marries. You certainly would not predict that he married at one year old. You may say your prediction of marriage at twenty-four came by inference — so why did you not infer marriage at one? Because people marry in that age range. Give yourself a bazi and dare to tell a ninety-five-year-old man that he married last year.

Therefore: the only way to test whether a bazi theoretical system possesses truth is whether it can precisely distinguish the differing fates of five-fold and six-fold coincidences.

With the Lü Wen-yi natural-science bazi system, even if ten thousand five-fold coincidences from all over the world stood before us at once, we could rank all ten thousand in order from one to ten thousand across wealth, career, office, marriage, children, lifespan, health, safety and lawsuits. That is a bazi theory that genuinely possesses truth.