The Parallel and the Rob Are Essentially Different

Translator's note. A short but load-bearing distinction. The trade lumps “parallel” and “rob” together as one ten god; Lü separates them on the narrowest possible ground: the parallel is you, repeated, and the rob is everyone else of your element. Four jia woods in a chart are one man with four houses, which is why his readings differ from another man's under the same chart. There is also an unusually candid passage on why the teacher uses invented charts in class.

Why separate the parallel from the rob?

Because, to be exact, the parallel is oneself, and the rob is siblings and friends. If your day master is jia wood, then even four jia woods in the stems are all you. You may object: is not the day master me? How are the other jia woods also me? The jia in the year pillar is not you, but it is your house. You have four houses and four wives; you can sleep here one night and there the next. If someone attacks the day pillar you can run to the year pillar; if someone attacks the year pillar you can run to the day pillar. So those four jia woods are you. In the branches, the ten stems have no parallel — whatever is there is rob. Let us write out a chart:

Jiawu, Jiaxu, Jiazi, Jiashen

I have said that in my lectures, apart from using your own charts, I never prepare a chart in advance. Someone says: Teacher Lü, the charts you use in class are made up — how can they be accurate? I tell you, my charts are made up; but I also tell you a principle. Understand the principle, then take your own chart and your friends' charts and see whether it works. That is the point. I could take the chart written above and tell you the whole of Journey to the West from it; I could take a chart and tell you the whole life of Liu Bei, and every reading would come out accurate. What use is that? What matters is that you learn the principle, then read your own fate, your family's, your friends', the people you know and understand — and see whether it comes out right by that principle. That is the foundation. It is not about whether the chart I wrote on the board is a real one and whether my reading of it is accurate. My accuracy is no use: however accurate I am, it is I who am accurate, which does not make you accurate. Your accuracy is the foundation. You came to study so that you would be accurate, not so that I would be. Hence the invented charts.

Apart from the day master jia, every other jia is a parallel. There is an advantage in that: if someone comes to the day pillar, this house, to attack him, how many other places does he have to run to? This is what we call the cunning hare with four burrows — four places to run back and forth among, which makes him very hard to find. But that is when bad things are looking for him. When good things are looking for him, are they not equally hard to find? Every advantage carries a disadvantage; that is the rule of this world, and everything runs in both directions. Which is to say: it is the same as the self sitting on eating-and-wounding, on wealth, on seal, on officer-and-killer. Those three jia woods in the year, month and hour are all him — except that he may spend three hundred days a year living at the day pillar and the rest of the time somewhere else. Or you may say that the day master is himself and the other jia woods are his shadows. Understand? It can be understood entirely that way.

So when the day master jia wood grabs money, all the other jia woods can spend it. That is the parallel, and in prediction the parallel deserves particular attention. If the year pillar is Jiayin, then the yin wood is called rob, not parallel. Mao wood is also rob when it appears, and yi wood is rob as well. Only one's own repetition is called parallel. This point is very important; in later prediction you will find that it raises your accuracy substantially.