What Is the Use of Reading a Fate?

Translator's note. The plainest statement of what prediction is for, and the one to hand a sceptic. A reading is a health check, not a treatment: it finds the problem, and the intervention comes afterwards. Four uses follow — averting harm, timing a good move, raising a person to the top of their own level, and adjusting a company's premises. The definition offered in the middle is worth noting: prediction is “a mode of inference that is mathematical and philosophical,” not a mystery.

Reading a fate is like a medical check-up. The check finds what is wrong, and we then use every means medicine has to bring the body back to health. That is the point of a check-up. The point of reading a fate is the same: if we find bad people and bad events ahead, we can avoid or resolve them by various means; if we find good people and good events ahead, we can also work to bring them sooner and to enlarge the result. Prediction itself does not change a fate, any more than a check-up cures a disease. Prediction is only an instrument and a method for examining the course of a life. Only intervention on the basis of the prediction achieves the purpose — moving toward the auspicious, away from the inauspicious, turning harm into benefit.

Prediction is not mysterious and not superstitious. It is a mode of inference that is mathematical and philosophical. To understand fate prediction correctly is beneficial and not harmful to our society. To see the subject correctly and to spread it is more conducive to breaking down superstition: the less one understands a thing, and the less one is able to understand it, the more easily one sinks into the swamp of superstition.

First. When a bad event is predicted, comprehensive adjustment by various methods, together with one's own adjustment, can turn a great matter into a small one and a small one into nothing. Even a bad event that has already occurred — a lawsuit, an illness, a quarrel — can, through adjustment, be dissolved to the greatest possible extent.

Second. When a good event is predicted, comprehensive adjustment plus one's own adjustment allows one to choose the right timing, the right manner of acting, and to move quickly — so that the thing is done faster and better.

Third. Through adjusting the feng shui of the ancestral grave and the home, one can change the energy of a person's life and fate, and push him to the summit of the level he was born at. With a large-scale adjustment one can even push a person past his native level onto the next one up. Suppose a man's native level is that of a county or division chief. Even at that level he is not necessarily at its summit. Adjust the feng shui and his life-fate energy rises, and he may reach the top of that level, or jump to the next, the provincial-ministerial level. But to jump a whole level by feng shui, one must find an ancestral grave of exceptional energy and a home of exceptional energy, so as to obtain enough of that great energy; otherwise one can only reach the top of one's own level. The same applies to wealth, length of life, health, the quality of one's children, cultural level and moral character, exactly as to official rank.

Fourth. For an enterprise or institution, adjusting the feng shui — especially the position of the leader's office and the finance office, and the arrangement of what is inside them — can not only increase the unit's wealth but increase the leader's chances of promotion, and further avert unpleasantness such as quarrels and lawsuits involving the leader.

The greatest significance of reading a fate is this: to guard against trouble before it arrives, to mend the roof before it rains, to make every adjustment and preparation in advance, so as to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead and win the greatest victory.