The Shikongren Method: Cases, Volume One

Translator's note. The opening essay of the case volume, and the manifesto for the method used throughout it: read one change in a person's expression, one gesture, one shift in the scene around him, and name the event and its date. No hexagram, no chart, no birth time, no face reading. Two examples from a 2024 training course — a butterfly and a thumb across the nose — are given as the kind of thing this yields. The claim is not intuition but a fixed inference from a fixed table, which is what distinguishes it, in Lü's account, from the “external response” guessing that the trade sells.

Watch one change in another person's expression.

Watch one change in his gesture or movement.

Watch any change in the environment around him.

And from it predict, and verify, at exactly what point in his past, present or future a fortunate or unfortunate event of what nature occurred (or will occur), and with what kind of thing he will enter a close relation.

No casting of hexagrams.

No casting of charts or boards.

No asking his birth time.

No reading of his palms or his face.

No complicated chain of reasoning.

No need for him to have asked you for a reading at all.

You need only want to read, and you can predict for anyone, precisely, what kind of event occurred or will occur and when. To read a person you need only watch him from a distance for a few moments. Stranger or acquaintance, his fate information is yours: you can speak flatly and be accurate beyond error.

This technique is the Shikongren predictive method, a core system within Lü Wen-yi's Shikongren theoretical framework. It is one of the central courses of the disciple class and the hundred-day top-predictor intensive, and is currently taught to no more than one hundred and thirty people in total.

The technique is very easy to learn. It rests on two things only: judging the auspicious or inauspicious quality of any gesture, action or expression, and judging the auspicious or inauspicious quality of the people and things implicated by any change in the external environment. Both tables are published in full in the study materials; learning consists of looking them up and remembering them.

For example, during the hundred-day intensive of 16–27 August 2024, Lü Wen-yi saw a butterfly fly past a student named Chen and said on the spot: “In such-and-such a year a woman pursued you. You were moved but nothing substantial happened. Even now, from time to time, a little happiness comes back to you when you think of her.” Chen was embarrassed to admit it at the time, but a while later acknowledged publicly that it had happened.

Master Hua wiped his nostril with a finger. Teacher Lü said: “In such-and-such a year, in a matter of the greatest importance concerning money, you suffered a heavy defeat.” Hua said: “That year I went with a friend to Yunnan to gamble on rough jade. We not only made nothing, I lost a great deal. After that failure I threw myself into studying yixue, and I have been in it ever since.”

Across the whole twenty-six days of the course, Lü Wen-yi's readings of more than five hundred cases supplied by the students were a hundred per cent correct, without a single error. Every student present also mastered the technique, and reached the level at which, at one glance at any person, they can speak flatly and accurately about that person's fate. The Shikongren method is emphatically not the “external response” trick of guessing wildly. It is a complete theoretical system, in which time, space and person are perfectly united and the derivation follows strict logic, for making accurate qualitative predictions of events in a human life.

On the qualitative judgement of fortune and the precise dating of events, every other predictive art, once you have mastered this one, is not fit to tie its shoes.

The Shikongren method genuinely achieves the old ideal that “one who is good at the Changes does not divine.” With it, the slightest movement of the person before you and the slightest change in the things around him suffice to predict, very precisely, what kind of event happened to him at what time before, and what kind will happen at what time after. Some of the basics were taught publicly some years ago, and many friends in yixue now use them. Some say: this is the external-response method. I say: that is the remark of someone who has found no truth in predictive studies at all. Shikongren prediction rests on strict logical derivation from objective regularities — the relation between person and time, between person and environment, between time and environment, between a person's movements and time, between his movements and the environment, between his movements and the reader. “External response” is what a reader imagines off the top of his head. One and the same omen will yield ten thousand readings from ten thousand readers, which is exactly why so many students, having learned any number of external-response schools, go home and cannot apply them: you do not necessarily have the imagination of those “masters.” Yet faced with a client who raises an eyebrow, a hundred thousand Shikongren students will derive the same single result — because this is not prediction by imagination but by strict logic. That is the great difference between a natural-science predictive method and a humanistic con.