What Exactly Are the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches? (Part 1)

Translator's note. This is not an introductory text. It is an argument, written by a practitioner against his own tradition. Lü Wenyi's method is to take a classical rule, test it against logic and against observable fact, and discard it if it fails. Readers new to the subject may find the opening section dense; the glossary entries for tiangan dizhi, yongshen and tiaohou will help. Terms are given in pinyin on first use so they can be checked against the Chinese sources.

For several thousand years our understanding of the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches (tiangan dizhi) has been narrow. We have taken the pair to mean only four things:

1. Time.
2. Direction.
3. Environmental objects.
4. Anatomical correspondences — in the reading of a person's fate, the Stems and Branches are taken to point to parts of the body.

What we actually know is the sexagenary way of counting years — and counting years is only time. Students of the tradition and professional diviners alike have therefore concluded that the Stems and Branches are time. From that conclusion everything else follows: when we use the system to study a person's fate or to solve a problem, we treat the pair as nothing but a timestamp.

But our ancestors were explicit. The Stems and Branches carry time, and they carry direction, and they carry environmental objects. They stand for time, and at the same time for direction, and beyond that for the ten thousand things.

The truth is that our ancestors understood this pair more completely, more concretely and more deeply than any master of the past three thousand years — ourselves included. We have cast fortunes for three thousand years. We say tiangan dizhi every day. And we have used it to do nothing but tell time, while quietly ignoring the direction, the environment and the bodily correspondences the system also encodes. That is why Bazi fortune-telling has been, for millennia, a set of folk tricks that simply does not deliver accurate results.

I have said before that the seventy or eighty per cent accuracy these practitioners claim is a matter of probability plus cold reading. You may object: I predicted that this client would marry in 2014, and she did marry in 2014 — was that cold reading too? No, you could not have observed a 2014 marriage by watching her face. But you do not know why the chart let you derive 2014 rather than 2015. You do not actually understand the principle at work, and the derivation you believe you used is not necessarily correct.

Correctness is not decided by what you think or what I think. Nor is a conclusion correct merely because you reached it by reasoning — because there are two kinds of reasoning: rigorous logical inference, and a process that merely looks like reasoning. You may be running the second kind. And a flawed process will sometimes still land on a correct conclusion.

Even mathematics, the most rigorous form of inference we have, sometimes produces results that contradict observed fact. That is why mathematics still contains unsolved problems. Some years ago, at a middle-school olympiad in the United States, a student placed first but did not score full marks. He asked the committee to re-mark his paper. They did, and told him he had one answer wrong. He said he had not. They replied that they were mathematics experts and did not misjudge papers.

The question, roughly, was this: after folding a sheet of paper a certain number of times, how many edges does it have? The boy went to the committee and folded the paper in front of them. The result had one more edge than the mathematicians had calculated. To this day they have not identified the error.

Think about what that means. The reasoning looked impeccable. If it had truly been impeccable, the result would have matched the fact. It did not, so there is an error in it — and nobody can say where. A flawed chain of reasoning can therefore produce a correct answer; a rigorous chain can produce a wrong one. All we can do is defer to the observed result.

This is why I say that any theory or technique in Yixue must be judged on three grounds: scientific interpretation, rigorous logical inference, and observed fact. If we cannot prove by logic how many edges the fold produces, then we count the edges. The count is the count. Fact can overturn inference. Fact can discard every scientific interpretation we have.

Take the rule that “a door facing a door is inauspicious.” If logical reasoning can refute it, well and good. If logic cannot, and science cannot interpret it, then we look at the facts — and the fact is that not every household with facing doors suffers misfortune. Some prosper. Every household has bad things happen to it. If you insist that the bad things must have been caused by the facing doors, you have made an error of thinking, a serious error of inference. For any household that suffers misfortune, we could name any number of causes: the husband's flatulence at night, the son's table manners, the colour of the bedsheets, the timing of when the bedsheets were laid out. To single out the doors is arbitrary.

So “facing doors bring misfortune” is a proposition that survives neither logical scrutiny nor contact with fact. And this is the proposition that has been in use for millennia.

Our ancestors held that the Stems and Branches have these four aspects. In practice we use only the time aspect, and now and then the directional one — and even then we have never established what the precise correspondence between direction and the sexagenary signs actually is, or what rule governs it.

The result is familiar. We glance at a chart, announce “Kui Gang meets the realm of Fire — riches and honour under heaven,” and send everyone whose chart contains the Kui Gang star off to the south, the direction of Fire. Some of them go south and die there; some go bankrupt; some lose their families. This is what the traditional theory has been doing: harming people.

Consider tiaohou — “temperature adjustment” — the classical technique of choosing a chart's Yongshen by warming or cooling it. Then answer me this: if we ship a polar bear to the tropics and adjust its temperature, does the polar bear live? If we drop ice cubes into the aquarium to cool things down for your tropical fish, do the fish live? The rule that “when Metal is cold and Water is chilled, use Fire to warm them” is absurd. For a great many things in this world, temperature adjustment is simply not available. The result of adjusting them is death.

The coconut palm grows on Hainan Island and suffers from heat. Move it to Shanxi and it might survive two or three months of summer before dying. You cannot adjust a coconut palm. Adjusting it kills it.

Human beings are no different from anything else in this respect. Adjust, and you adjust to death. The whole notion of selecting a Yongshen by temperature adjustment is absurd. We must respect the facts: you cannot adjust a polar bear, a tropical fish, a coconut palm or an apple tree.

Why are there no apples in the south? Because an apple tree moved to a warm region flowers but does not set fruit. Adjust its temperature as you like; it will not produce apples. In real life, the things that can actually be “adjusted” amount to less than one per cent. No species — plant or animal — can simply be planted anywhere and expected to flower, fruit and reproduce.

I once picked up a seed of the Hainan sword bean and planted it in my home village in Shanxi. The following year the vine grew vigorously — and produced not a single flower, let alone a pod. On Hainan the pods grow as long as a sword. In Shanxi, nothing. That is what “adjusting the temperature” of a Hainan bean does.

The same applies to potatoes. Take seed potatoes straight from Heilongjiang to Shanxi and you get a poor crop. They have to be brought south in stages. Plant them in Shanxi in the first year and the yield will be low and the tubers small; plant the following year's generation and only then do you get a good crop. Even plant breeding cannot be “adjusted” — the organism has to adapt to the new environment before it can take root, sprout and reproduce.

Our tiaohou theory is armchair theorising. On paper it sounds reasonable: the chart runs too hot, so cool it toward the middle. But that is a philosophical notion, and it does not translate into natural science.

The books offer another version. Two people whose charts both “need Water”: one is born on a boat, the other beside a blacksmith's furnace. The one born on the boat later becomes an official in the capital; the one born by the furnace becomes a blacksmith. The explanation given is that the Water-deficient person born on the water became an official, while the one born by the fire stayed at the forge.

It sounds plausible for about three seconds. In fact it is a delusion built on careless thinking. If Water is the Yongshen, how much water? A drop, or a bucket? An ocean, or a stream? If Fire is the Jishen, is the fire of a forge necessarily the Fire that harms this chart? How much fire does it take to damage it?

The ancients never asked about quantity. Picture a man in the desert. A bottle of water will slake his thirst; a single water molecule will do nothing. Water may be his Yongshen, but one molecule will not carry him out of the desert. So the inherited theory rests on a flawed mode of thought, and it misleads us. “The Yongshen is Water, so live near water; the Jishen is Fire, so avoid fire” — logic alone shows this to be absurd.

Then there is the maxim “when things reach an extreme, they reverse.” This too is a philosophical concept. In physics it does not exist. In the physical world, reaching an extreme does not produce reversal; it produces destruction. Do you turn back into a child at eighty? No — you live on, and then you end. You go to the extreme and you die; you do not return to childhood and start again. Eat steamed buns without stopping and eventually you die of them, but the buns do not come back out of you.

In the physical world, anything pushed to its limit undergoes qualitative change, and the result is a different thing — not the original thing reversed. So “extreme produces reversal” has no place in physics.

Yet practitioners of traditional fortune-telling spend their days applying a philosophical concept to a physical world. Human beings do not live inside philosophy. They live inside matter and energy, and in that world they are affected by matter and energy. They are not affected by philosophy. Philosophy, properly speaking, belongs to psychology, or to a corner of the humanities and social sciences.

And we have conflated the humanities with the natural sciences in the study of prediction. Until that changes — until the habit of thinking changes — you will not see what divination actually is.