What Exactly Are the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches? (Part 3)

Translator's note. This final part is the most polemical of the three. It moves from the mechanics of the system to an attack on the profession — on the schools, on the masters who write the books, and on the habit of mind that keeps the whole thing running. The author names the four canonical Tang-dynasty geomancers (Yang, Liao, Zeng, Lai) and refers to a living academic under the anonymisation used in the Chinese original; that anonymisation has been preserved. The Chinese text is more personal in its accusations than the English renders it. Nothing in the argument depends on the accusations, so readers who find them distracting can skip the four paragraphs marked as such without losing the thread. Two technical terms recur: shengqi, the “life-breath,” and yinyang chonghe zhi qi, the qi of yin and yang in harmonious opposition.

When you study traditional culture, do not assume that traditional culture is superstition. It is called superstition because you tell clients nonsense like “Jia Yang Wood is a towering tree, Yi Yin Wood is a flower or a shrub.” If you genuinely understood that Jiazi means a particular kind of energy in your body — that a person born in a Jiazi year has a different particle-clustering from one born in a Yichou year — then things would look different.

When the year Jihai arrives, the energy that Ji and Hai bring from the cosmos, the energy of the configuration of Ji, Hai, Saturn, Jupiter, the Sun and Earth, strikes the Earth. The clustered particles in your body are affected by that incoming energy, and the clustering changes.

Take an example. We are sitting in orderly rows in a classroom when a wolfdog bursts in, leaping and thrashing. Our seating is scattered and disordered. That is how external energy breaks an existing order.

This is why the “current year, current month, current day, current hour” affect a person's fate. Not because time acts on us. Because energy arriving from that direction strikes our bodies and turns the hand-in-hand particles into back-to-back ones. Our fate changes. Time is not what changes it.

If your habit of thought shifts, then when you look at a Bazi chart or at a feng shui you will understand why a human fate is the way it is.

This is the essence of the Stems and Branches: they stand for the form of particle-clustering in the body; they stand for what energy our body will receive in a given period, and therefore what mode and what intensity of influence we are under. That, and nothing else, is the essence.

Direction is not a detail

Once we know that, we know how much direction matters. This year is a Hai year. We are affected far more by energy from the Hai direction than from the Xu direction.

If we understand how the Jupiter–Saturn system relates to the Sun and to Earth, then in a Jiazi year we know their positional relation, can draw it on paper, and can go outside at night and find where Saturn and Jupiter actually are. In a Hai year the greatest influence on us is Jupiter's occupying the Hai sector of the sky. So in a Hai year, energy from the Hai direction has absolutely first-order influence on everything on Earth, people included.

Move toward Hai and you are going against the current. Move away from Hai, toward Si, and you are going with it. Going with the current and against it affect a fate differently.

So reading a fate from time alone is reading blind. You must understand that moving in different directions — the energy arriving from that direction — will affect the clustering of the particles already formed in your body. Move toward Hai, and the energy of Hai turns your hand-in-hand particles back-to-back. Move toward Mao, and the energy of Mao turns them head-to-head. Move toward Wu, and the energy of Wu turns them foot-hooked-to-foot.

A human fate is not decided by time at all. It is decided by the direction we move in, and by the environment we live in once we have moved there. Time is only a label — but from that label we can roughly judge how a thing will develop and change.

Here is an example. I tell you this glass of water has stood for three days. Counting three days, you infer that the water has gone cold. But it may not have. Ignore the environment the glass is in, and of ten thousand glasses of water, nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine will have cooled and one will not — because nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine were carried to the North Pole and one to the equator, set out in the sun. After three days that one is still warm. Direction of movement and the environment a thing exists in decide whether the glass is hot or cold after three days.

It is quite normal that reading a fate from time alone gets some of it right, because what you get right is the shared part of some people's fates. But the world does not move according to fixed laws. If it did, the world would not deteriorate. If every driver obeyed the rules there would be no crashes. If every part in a car ran as designed, the engine would never fail and the brakes would never give out. The world's actual motion is not one hundred per cent according to basic law. The world changes because nothing in it — people included — moves according to the normal law of fate.

Which brings us to another habit of thought, and the enormous gap between it and objective fact.

The basic law is not the world

From the day we begin learning fortune-telling we are shown “Wood generates Fire, Fire generates Earth, Earth generates Metal, Metal generates Water, Water generates Wood.” This cycle is not wrong. It is only the basic law — and the basic law is not the whole of how things generate and overcome one another.

In objective fact, the quantity of Fire generating Wood vastly exceeds the quantity of Wood generating Fire. Fire generating Wood is the fundamental reason the world exists, not Wood generating Fire. Wood generating Fire is the basic law. In the human world we see only that wood can light a fire, and we do not see the fire that is sunlight. The ancients said sunlight is Fire. Without sunlight, would plants on Earth still exist? Without light, every plant on Earth dies and is gone. Plants exist because they are struck by sunlight — Fire generating Wood. Without that, there would be no plants on Earth.

Everyone says Fire generates Earth. But you have not noticed that Earth generating Fire is more powerful still. Coal is Earth, and coal generates fire — Earth generating Fire.

Petroleum has the Water property of the Five Phases. “Moistening and descending” is the signature of Water, and petroleum, gasoline, kerosene and diesel all have it: run, moistening, means it penetrates; xia, descending, is a mode of motion. Every petroleum has this moistening-descending function. By the Five Phases, petroleum is Water in character — and petroleum is precisely what generates fire. Which shows that the ancients' generation-and-overcoming cycle is only the basic law, and the basic law cannot explain everything in this world.

In geometry, side-angle-side gives you congruent triangles. That one rule cannot solve every triangle problem, because you can also prove congruence by side-side-side, or by angle-angle-side. So the Five-Phase cycle is only the basic law.

If we want to read a fate accurately, if we want to interpret this world, we cannot judge by the basic law.

In the Jinsuo Yuguan and Guolu Yinyang schools: “sand in the east is auspicious, water in the west is auspicious.” In practice, plenty of eldest sons with water in the east still get promoted, get rich, fill the house with children and live to a hundred — while men with sand in the east lose money, die young, and are cut down by blades or shot. The facts show that “sand east, water west is auspicious” is only the basic law.

To try to unlock the world's secrets with one basic qualitative rule is like a kindergarten child who has just learned that 1 + 1 = 2 setting out to crack Goldbach's conjecture.

There is a joke about this. A landlord hires a tutor for his son. Day one the tutor teaches “one” — a single stroke. Day two, “two” — two strokes. Day three, “three” — three strokes. The son then tells his father he has learned to write, and the tutor is dismissed. Day four, the landlord wants to invite a guest to dinner and asks his son to write an invitation to a man named Qian Baiwan — “Thousand Hundred Ten-Thousand.” Days pass and the invitation is not ready. The landlord goes to look, opens the door, and finds the room strewn with paper covered in horizontal strokes. The son looks up: “Why does this guest have such a strange name as Thousand Hundred Ten-Thousand? I haven't finished the strokes yet.”

That is the joke that basic law alone produces. To think you can finish writing by basic law is an absurd habit of thought — and it is widespread among practitioners of Yixue.

So when we face the basic law we must ask: every rule, every judgement, has a range of application. Every science has a range of application. There is no science that holds everywhere. Every science is reliable within a certain range and unreliable outside it. So every judgement is reliable — and because you do not know its range, you get hit-and-miss results.

Someone says scientists have identified more than two hundred kinds of cold virus; vaccinate against one and you catch another, so no matter how you treat it you still catch colds. Then a few days ago, at the import expo in Shanghai, an American company launched a cold remedy that clears every type of cold virus within twenty-four hours — because earlier remedies looked at the body structure of one particular virus, whereas this one found the single life-defect common to all of them. So one drug clears them all.

Feng shui is the same. If we understood what feng shui essentially is, all the feng shui schools would be like the different cold vaccines. Look for the common flaw the way the drug company looked for the common defect, and one school would solve every feng shui problem the way one drug cures every cold. Our theory can defeat every school, because we know what feng shui is.

Feng shui is not a magnetic field

Many people say feng shui is a magnetic field. It is not. The magnetic field is only a tool we use when we study feng shui.

Why use that tool? Because through it we can tell where east, south, west and north are. The magnetic field is for determining direction — because only by determining direction can we know that energy from the east and energy from the west have different effects on our bodies once they enter. We must know which direction's energy is entering our body before we can know whether we are fortunate or unfortunate in this environment.

The magnetic field is nothing but a tool for judging direction. Feng shui is not a magnetic field, and a magnetic field is not feng shui. Anyone who says the magnetic field is feng shui has not even understood the old books.

The ancients said it plainly: “The buried take advantage of the life-breath.” Every practitioner knows this line and quotes it. About the life-breath, or the vein-breath of the dragon, the ancients were clear: it is the qi of yin and yang in harmonious opposition. That is not a magnetic field. Feng shui is the qi of yin and yang in harmonious opposition; the energy of feng shui is the life-breath; the energy of feng shui is the vein-breath of the dragon. Therefore feng shui is not a magnetic field.

We, the descendants of the ancients, actually believe feng shui is a magnetic field — and then wonder why we cannot use feng shui to benefit people and ourselves and solve their problems. This is the fundamental reason the masters ruin themselves and their own children. How many masters have adjusted their own sons and daughters into good fortune? Not many. Nor have many adjusted other people's families completely — because they all believe feng shui is a magnetic field.

Now there is even a school called “genetic feng shui.” Feng shui has nothing to do with genes. What a gene is, the masters themselves do not know. I asked a master the difference between DNA and RNA and he did not know — and having invented “genetic feng shui” without knowing the relation between the two, he founded a school.

The profession

The next four paragraphs are the author's attack on the profession. They are translated as written.

So I say this profession is full of deliberate frauds. Such deliberate frauds come to a bad end.

The ordinary practitioner who studies the theory and does not set out to cheat people still accumulates merit — because everyone a non-deliberate practitioner kills was going to die anyway, and everyone he helps was going to be well anyway. Those practitioners are only doing the work of folk custom, and the content of that work is burying the dead. That is why the village grave-diggers, the tu yinyang, mostly suffer no retribution. Most of them accumulate merit by burying the dead, and many of their descendants get into Tsinghua and Peking University, or rise in office and grow rich.

But of the masters who write books and run classes and take disciples, hardly any have outstanding descendants, and hardly any escape cancer — because they know they are harming people and go on harming them, whereas the village tu yinyang is following the book, burying people by the methods written in the book, inventing nothing and defrauding no one. So the spirits do not settle accounts with the tu yinyang. They settle them with the men who wrote the books. Which is why, from antiquity to the present, few of those who wrote the books died well. Of the four great masters who wrote — Yang, Liao, Zeng and Lai — not one died well. All came to miserable ends. Shao Yong could calculate heaven and earth and everything else with accuracy, and in the end died of cold and hunger, disease and a shortened life. Had he truly known the relations among the way of Heaven, the way of Earth and the way of Man, then even without office, riches or long life, he should not have died in poverty and sickness.

A professor at a certain university, well past eighty, was found by several hospitals to have a tumour; when they opened him up there was none. Medicine has never explained it. After that his health declined sharply and he stopped reading feng shui and telling fortunes — because when he worked for clients he was not thinking about getting them completely well, he was thinking about how to talk them into paying more. Spirits have powers; some are weaker than a man, some stronger. This professor met one stronger than himself, one that left his belly alone ordinarily but tormented it exactly when he went to hospital, so that the scan found a tumour. Even if you do not believe in spirits, I can put it in physical terms: when he went to a client's house to read the feng shui and take the client's money, he was moving, doing work — and work done accumulates energy in the body. A master who knows his theory is wrong and lectures anyway, who knows he cannot adjust a client's fate and takes the money anyway, will certainly come to a bad end.

What the Stems and Branches actually stand for

The Stems and Branches are not only time. They stand for what clustered particles exist inside a thing; for the form of particle-clustering in each person's body; and for the fact that energy arriving from the different directions — Jia, Mao, Yi and the rest — acts on a person in entirely different modes and at entirely different intensities.

Take an example. The classroom is a person, and we students in it are the cells in that person's body. Now a wolfdog, a small fox terrier and a biting Tibetan mastiff burst in.

If it is the little fox terrier, we glance at it and go on listening quietly — as harmless as a fly. If it is a mastiff that bites, we panic, get up out of our seats, stop listening; and the disorder is like a man getting cancer, or his head being crushed under a car — disaster, and death.

The Stems and Branches stand for energy from different directions, whose influence on a person is entirely different. And they stand for the ten thousand things — because energy from the Jia direction has a particular mode of motion, energy from Jia and from Yi in the sky has its own distinctive mode of motion, and the matter inside every thing around us likewise has a mode of motion.

The energy in this glass of water has its own mode of motion, and it resembles the mode of motion of energy arriving from the cosmic direction Ren–Zi–Gui. So we connect the thing “water” with Ren Zi Gui.

Plants are Wood. The mode of flow of the energy moving inside a plant resembles the mode of motion of energy arriving from the cosmic direction Jia–Mao–Yi. So we connect “Wood” with Jia Mao Yi.

That is, the Stems and Branches stand for which thing's internal mode of energy motion is identical with which cosmic mode of energy motion. Only when you understand this can you find what prediction actually rests on, and know how feng shui acts on a human life. Only then, when we use these techniques to remake a life — using the chart and the environment a person lives in to remake their fate — will we know what is needed.

It is emphatically not a matter of putting out a lucky cat and expecting money. A lucky cat may bring you cancer.

Keeping a dog is not necessarily for guarding the gate; dogs also kill people. To think a dog will certainly bring you happiness is a foolish habit of thought, because the objective material world does not move in the order of your thinking. If it did, the world would be good and free of suffering. So only when you know what a lucky cat placed there is attracting can you place one — because a lucky cat can attract money, and can also attract disaster, thieves, illness, and a lover for your husband. Whether to place one is a question for scientific logic and objective fact, not for subjective imagination.

Some people place a pixiu thinking it will eat other people's wealth and deposit it in their house. But I can equally hold that the pixiu eats your household's wealth, keeps it in its belly, and drops it far outside your gate. So a pixiu does not necessarily enrich you; and even if it does bring wealth inside, a pixiu of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal or Water brings a different kind of wealth.

Our entire traditional culture sits inside absurd habits of thought. We must face it rationally and objectively rather than hearing, believing and following blindly. If you are one of the three-blind — blind of ear, blind of belief, blind of following — then it would be very strange if you were neither cheated nor cheating. For the three-blind to be cheated by masters is what accords with the way of Heaven and Earth; otherwise Heaven's principle would not permit it. And if you are not cheating people, Heaven's principle does not permit that either, because your habit of thought is the habit of thought of the cheated and of the cheating.

Only by adjusting your habit of thought, and knowing the nature of this world rationally and objectively, will you stop being cheated — and you will not need to cheat, and can still rise in office and grow rich, change your life for the better, and steer your fate toward the best direction available.