The Environmental System of Bazi Prediction

Translator's note. The shortest and most consequential of the three system essays. A bazi is not a clock: the same stems and branches encode time, direction and environment, which is why a chart can be read backwards from a living body, and why the question “the useful god arrived, so why did the bad thing happen?” has an answer. Lü's image is an equilateral triangle: know any two sides and the third follows.

The environmental system is very important, and it is more accurate than the time system. Of the three systems of bazi prediction, the time system is the least accurate — and yet traditional bazi predicts entirely by the time system.

(1) In the original chart, whether a stem is a useful god or an unfavourable god, if the corresponding body part has grown into a favourable form, then the direction that stem corresponds to in the person's prenatal feng shui must have auspicious sand and auspicious water.

(2) In the original chart, whether a stem is a useful god or an unfavourable god, if the corresponding body part has grown into an unfavourable form, then the direction that stem corresponds to in the person's prenatal feng shui must have inauspicious sand and inauspicious water.

(3) This refers chiefly to the ring in which the person is positioned in the feng shui. If the small configuration lies more than a hundred metres out, the small configuration is what counts.

The pregnancy environment means the small configuration, because pregnancy lasts only ten months and sand or water several kilometres away cannot reach the foetus. In this it differs from the ancestral grave.

In the original chart, whether a stem is useful or unfavourable, so long as your body parts grew according to the useful god and not according to the demands of the unfavourable god, then that stem in the chart corresponds in prenatal feng shui to auspicious sand and water.

Suppose a stem is the useful god in the chart but the body part did not grow as the useful god requires; and suppose a stem is the unfavourable god in the chart and the body part did grow as the unfavourable god requires — then that stem corresponds in prenatal feng shui to inauspicious sand and water.

The stems and branches of a bazi stand for time, for direction and for environment all at once. Our ancestors' positioning of the bazi was in fact extremely accurate; it was later generations who insisted that a bazi was only a time, and that is what made accurate prediction impossible, and what made it impossible to reason back and forth between “time, space and person.” A person stands in front of us: we can draw the feng shui layout of his home and mark the sand and water in all twenty-four directions of his pregnancy environment. Conversely, if we have seen a family's feng shui layout and know the person's bazi, we can say which part of that person's body will have grown into what shape. Prediction is an equilateral triangle: know any two sides and the third can be derived.

(4) In annual-cycle prediction, if the useful god does not perform its useful function and the unfavourable god fully performs its unfavourable one, then that useful god's or that unfavourable god's stem must correspond, in the acquired feng shui of where the person lives or works that year, to inauspicious sand and water.

(5) In annual-cycle prediction, if the useful god performs its useful function and the unfavourable god does not perform its unfavourable one, then that stem must correspond, in the acquired feng shui of where the person lives or works that year, to auspicious sand and water.

From these few judgements it should be clear: every disaster in the time system of a bazi can be resolved. The so-called useful and unfavourable gods in the time system may both be illusory, because a useful god may not function at all. This is the root reason why, from antiquity to the present, so many fate scholars died without understanding “why nothing good happens when the useful god arrives, but bad things do; and nothing bad happens when the unfavourable god arrives, but good things do.” They did not understand that a bazi is the unity of three things: the time system, the directional system and the environmental system. Unite the three in prediction, and at least in the qualitative direction of auspicious and inauspicious you can reach one hundred per cent accuracy.