The “Bazi Model” Really Means a Functional-Feature Model

Translator's note. The single most useful metaphor in the collection. A bazi is not a destiny but a mould: it specifies what functions a person can perform, and the body — the outer form that the mould actually produced — tells you how much of that specification was met. Two televisions have identical electronics and one is seven inches and the other seventy; the same function, opposite failures. This is also why the prenatal environment and the ancestral grave, not the birth time, are said to decide the quality of a fate.

We have said repeatedly that the feng shui of the mother's home during pregnancy, together with the ancestral grave, decides the quality of a person's fate; the birth time — the bazi — merely reflects the type of functional features that fate will have. That is to say, every bazi is only the mould for a product of a certain functional type, and everyone born under the same bazi is a product out of the same mould. The same bazi only means that these products ought to have the same functional features. But since each person born under that bazi has a different birth environment — exactly as every product with television function differs enormously in outward form — people born under the same bazi likewise differ enormously in outward form. And because of that difference in form, their use value, range of use, service life and actual effect differ enormously too, just as with televisions. A seven-inch set is invisible from a distance; a seventy-inch set is unbearable at close range.

People are the same. Because people born under the same bazi differ enormously in form, their fates differ enormously. This is intelligible in theory as well. We have said that human beings live inside a four-dimensional system made of the three-dimensional physical space plus time. At any one moment, people are born at millions and millions of points in three-dimensional space. But because the matter surrounding each of those points differs enormously in nature and energy, the bodily features of the people born at those millions of points differ enormously, and so do their fate features. Therefore the bazi, which is only time, cannot by itself accurately determine the functional features of a product or a person's fate. Only by combining it with the product's own outward features can one accurately judge that product — with a television, only by its size can one judge whether it works best far away or close up — or that person's fate features. And more than that: as time passes, the material composition and energy around the point in three-dimensional space where a person was born and lives are themselves constantly changing; a person may even leave the point of birth and go to live at another point. Without combining the person's bodily changes, it is impossible to judge any individual's fortune by the bazi alone. That is why, through the bazi model theory, we can judge a person's fate features accurately. It is like televisions: whichever model best suits the social environment is the one most people chase. In the same way, among people born under one bazi, only the one whose bodily features have grown exactly as the environment required by that bazi would have them will receive more support and help from others — and only that one will have great wealth and high rank.

People born under the same bazi may have completely different bodily features, differing enormously. Only the person whose bodily features match exactly the auspicious outer form that the bazi prescribes can fully actualise that bazi's functional characteristics. Only such a person, having fully actualised them, can have great wealth, high rank, long life and good fortune. Those who cannot fully actualise their particular auspicious features can only have poverty, meanness, early death and misfortune.

So the “bazi model” in the Lü Wen-yi bazi model theory means, in substance, the functional model of the bazi; prediction consists in assessing, through outward features, whether this person has fully actualised the functional features that the bazi prescribes. Once you understand this, it is equally correct to regard the bazi as a concrete mould with geometric dimensions. And when you regard each bazi as a mould for a particular set of functional features, you will understand what a bazi means far more simply, and you will judge every aspect of every person's fortune far more accurately — because if the bazi is a mould and the person is a product, is it not obvious to anyone whether the product matches the mould? The closer the product is to the mould, the higher its quality; the further from the mould, the lower. And is high product quality not a good fate, and low quality a bad one? Using the bazi model theory, fate prediction becomes as simple and accurate as taking a photograph of one kind of flower to the flower market and comparing it with every flower there. Which one is identical to the photograph, which one is nothing like it — is that not the simplest thing in the world? I am confident that the Lü Wen-yi bazi model theory will help you stand out in the world of yixue and outshine the crowd.