The Principle of Adaptation

Translator's note. This is the keystone of the author's method, and the one idea here that a Western reader can test against intuition and find immediately useful. A chart does not say “an event will occur.” It says what will change relative to what already is. Move a grave from a good position to a bad one and the family meets disaster; move it from a bad position to a slightly less bad one and the family improves — same new position, opposite outcomes. From that one observation follow answers to three questions that otherwise defeat a reader: the marriage-year question, the illness question, and the prison question. The fish-and-polar-bear analogy and the camel in the desert carry the rest.

In my books I have repeated the same points over and over: that fate is materialist and dialectical; that the reading of fate is likewise materialist and dialectical; that the art of reading fate is a directional description, accurate in direction, of how people and events actually develop; that its predictive principle is nothing other than the reasoning of people and affairs in real life; and that anyone who studies the Yijing must stay tight against real life. Only with both feet on that ground can the study of yi achieve anything or break through anything.

Working in the field — surveying sites, judging charts, reading hexagrams — and teaching, it is precisely because my feet were on that ground that I did not go wrong. It let me tear off, quickly, the layers of superstition and fake method wrapped around the art, and see the thing as it is. That is where my essays exposing frauds in the field and false predictive theories came from, and where what I call Lu-style feng shui and Lu-style bazi came from.

What follows is one of the “secret techniques” — though it is nothing of the kind, only a small piece of ordinary reasoning — taken straight from everyday life.

1. Seven graves on one terrace

The example is here to show what the principle is worth in practice, not to advertise my skill.

In April 2005, at a training course for professional readers, a master from Lüliang in Shanxi, Mr Zhang Haizhu, put a question that silenced all forty-seven students present.

A mountain in his village had been requisitioned. Several dozen families had graves scattered on its slope. Within two or three days, seven of them moved their graves to the same level terrace on the hillside — a strip running east to west, no more than seven or eight metres wide and a few dozen metres long. East of the terrace was a deep ravine. West of it, near the edge, stood a huge high-tension pylon. Standing at the seven grave points and looking outward, the surrounding landform was indistinguishable; there was no variation worth speaking of. All seven had mountain to the north and falling slope to the south. All seven faced the same direction to the same degree — one geomancer had done them all.

Within a year, in two of the seven families, the eldest son of the deceased — the first-born male — had cancer. In the other families the eldest sons showed no marked change at all. In one family, the eldest son had actually improved.

By Lu-style theory, the family that moved first, and the family nearest the pylon, should have been the ones in trouble. Neither was. Mr Zhang asked: can Mr Lu tell, from these seven graves, which two families have the disaster in the first-born son, and which one has plainly improved?

The students assumed he was trying to humiliate me. They watched my face.

They did not know my teaching history. For six years, at every course, students had brought me questions of every bizarre shape; I was used to it. And the question only looked cruel to someone who did not know the principle of adaptation. Know it, and Mr Zhang's question answers itself.

I asked him: do you know the landform at the fate position of the eldest son at each of these seven graves before the move?

He described it, family by family. I then sorted the seven eldest sons into three types according to the auspiciousness at their own fate position before the move — good, bad, and neutral, meaning very little change in the quality of the position between before and after. Then I told the class:

• the two families whose eldest sons had stood at a good position were the two where disaster appeared after the move;
• the four families at a neutral position were the four where nothing much happened;
• the one family at a bad position was the family that plainly improved.

Mr Zhang confirmed the judgment on the spot, and could not for the life of him see why. Why should the good turn bad, and the bad turn good? The principle of adaptation was doing it.

2. What the principle says

Everything — person or object — has an environment it has already adapted to. Only inside that adapted environment does it keep to its existing trajectory. Change that environment abruptly, and the trajectory it was on is changed with it.

Put a tropical fish in the Arctic Ocean and it dies at once. Put a polar bear in the tropics and it dies too. But put the polar bear somewhere slightly colder than where it lived, or the tropical fish somewhere slightly warmer, and neither dies; both carry on normally.

A bronze buried for two thousand years and suddenly exposed to air begins to corrode almost immediately. Add a little more covering over it instead, and it will not corrode at all.

With that in hand, Mr Zhang's seven graves are unambiguous. The two eldest sons who had stood at a good position were moved to a position that was bad: they could not absorb the speed of the change from good to bad, and disaster followed. The one who had stood at a bad position was moved to a position much better in degree than his old one: he did not worsen; he improved, because the environment had eased. The four who had stood at positions bad to about the same degree as the new one changed neither way, and continued on their original track.

That is the principle of adaptation as it applies to reading fate.

3. The marriage question

A man has been married sixty years, devoted, no affairs. From his chart you can see which year he married. But suppose a client who has been married forty years asks: will I marry this year? You do not know his circumstances. What do you say?

You may say: I read that you married in such-and-such a year. But I will ask: does a chart hold marriage information in exactly one year and no other? If you admit it holds it in more than one, and this happens to be one of them, how do you judge?

Know the principle and you can answer with total confidence:

There is marriage information in your chart this year. If you are not yet married, then you will certainly marry this year. If you are already married, then you will not marry this year — instead the relationship will improve on what it was, or an affair will appear, or a long separation will end in reunion.

Same information, different expression, because the baseline is different.

4. The illness question

A man who has been tormented by a chronic illness for a dozen years asks whether this year holds illness or injury. His chart shows no such information this year. You do not know he is chronically ill. What do you say?

In your chart there is no illness information this year, so this year brings no illness. But if you were already ill before this year, then this year merely continues the condition and it will not suddenly worsen. If you were not ill before this year, then no illness will appear.

5. The prison question

An escaped convict asks whether this year holds prison. You do not know he is a fugitive, and the chart shows no prison information. What do you say?

Some master will claim he can see from the chart that the man is a fugitive. I ask him: does a man who spends his whole life in prison carry prison information in every year, every month, every day, every hour of his chart? If you say yes, then I ask: does a common labourer who never saved a penny carry “not one penny” in every year, month, day and hour of his chart? Say yes again and there is nothing left to discuss, because you are plainly lying with your eyes open, and there is no arguing with a man who wants his face more than he wants the facts. Say no — and this year, month, day, hour the client has chosen happens to be a moment with no prison information and a moment with a penny in it. Then what?

Know the principle and you answer:

Whatever you have or have not done, whatever sentence you have or have not served, this year you are a free man and this year holds no prison. But if you have offended before and been sentenced before, then the first year that does carry prison information is the year you are arrested and taken in.

The principle applies in feng shui and in bazi, and in every other predictive method as well.

6. The camel and the missing elements

The principle also explains a fact that puzzles everyone: why a man whose chart lacks one, two or even three of the five elements lives to eighty or ninety with wealth, honour and flourishing children, while a man whose chart is perfectly balanced dies young in poverty and leaves no heir.

Lacking one to three elements is not in itself frightening. The camel is the ship of the desert. Water is scarce there, but give it water wherever it is found, and it lives out its course in perfect order. A man short of one to three elements is no different: let the luck cycle or the year, month, day or hour supply the missing element in due course, and he continues along his own track.

But put the camel on a water meadow, permanently, and it sickens. Force the missing elements into a chart permanently, on the same logic, and you are not helping; you are doing harm.

Any living thing, any object, that still exists has adapted to its “short of this, short of that” environment, and does not experience it as suffering. To such a creature it is our environment that looks unbearable. We cannot judge a fish's feeling about water and air by our own need for air and our own fear of water.

Deficiency is not inauspicious; sufficiency is not auspicious. What matters is whether a thing can live freely in the environment it is in. If it can, that is auspicious; if it cannot, that is inauspicious.

The hive has its queen, the anthill its king, mankind its emperor, the heavens their Jade Emperor, the Buddhist cosmos its Tathagata. It is not suffering to be something other than the Jade Emperor; it is not suffering to be the queen of a hive. Force the Jade Emperor to be an ant king, force the ant king to be the Jade Emperor, and that is suffering, and that is death.

Move a person or a thing abruptly and on a large scale, and its trajectory lurches. Move it to a place not far from where it was, and the trajectory holds.

Once this is understood, a great many locked doors in this field open at once. Space forbids more examples; let the reader think.

7. Why this matters

Any method of prediction that leaves behind the reasoning of real people and real affairs is false doctrine and a way of taking money. Any method that stays tight against it can answer every awkward question that leaves the great masters, saints and prodigies of the field without a word. Any method that stays tight against it will survive a thousand years of testing by students of yi, and be passed down.

The two famous problems my systems claim to have solved — why people born at the same hour in the same place have different fates, and how a single chart can hold, in one year, promotion, loss of money, divorce, injury, dismissal, imprisonment and death — were both solved under the guidance of exactly this habit of thought.