Where Is the Truth in "Liuyao Prediction Theory"?

Translator's note. This essay is the companion to “How Do You Choose the Yongshen in Liuyao Divination?” — it supplies the test that the earlier piece assumes. The author's criterion is blunt: a divination theory may call itself scientific only if it survives two probes. Ask the same question a hundred times and the verdict must not change; hand the reader a heap of hexagrams and he must be able to sort them into the specific questions they answer. By that standard he acquits liuyao and convicts every “new liuyao” school currently on sale. The two classical texts he names — Huangjin Ce (《黄金策》, “Golden Policies,” a Ming compendium attributed to Liu Bowen) and Bushi Zhengzong (《卜筮正宗》, “The Orthodox of Divination,” Wang Hongxu's Qing manual) — remain the standard liuyao curriculum to this day. The original is deliberately rough, and several passages are personal attacks; we have kept the argument and cut the invective.

For more than a decade, a crowd of home-grown “swindler-masters” has made its living doing violence to the theory of traditional liuyao prediction — inventing “new liuyao theories” off the top of their heads and feeding them to students who do not know better. So I take up the scalpel again: objective, realistic, materialist, dialectical, scientific. Time to dissect these theories-for-fleecing.

Test one: repetition

If liuyao theory is genuinely scientific — objective, realistic, materialist, dialectical — then any single matter a querent asks about must survive being asked hundreds and thousands of times, and every one of those readings must return an absolutely identical verdict.

If you ask the same question a hundred times and get auspicious on this hexagram and inauspicious on that one, with no stable answer anywhere in the pile, then you may take it as proven: the theory is wrong, and it is a fraud.

So here is a challenge to every master who has ever invented a “new liuyao method.” Suppose I ask about one matter and shake the coins a hundred times. Suppose I then, without telling you, send a hundred different people to you — different status, different trades, different walks of life — each carrying one of those hundred hexagrams. Will you guarantee that your “new liuyao theory” derives the same verdict from all one hundred?

Perhaps the master will say yes. Then let the students do it themselves. Shake the coins eight or ten times over one question. Then have different students, in different cities, at different hours, telephone these masters and ask for a reading. You will learn exactly how shamelessly these men boast. It is a certainty that they will read the same matter, from its different hexagrams, as flatly opposite outcomes.

Practice is the only test of truth. If you want to know whether your teacher is a swindler, that is the test to run. If, on the other hand, you believe in your heart that liuyao is not a science but a matter of intuition and felt sense, then do not bother testing — you have already been taken, and you have earned it.

Because if liuyao is a science and not a pseudoscience, it must withstand repeated testing. And the essential difference between science and pseudoscience is exactly this: science can reproduce the same result under the same conditions; pseudoscience never can.

Test two: the heap of hexagrams

If liuyao theory is genuinely scientific, it must be able to solve every problem in real life that cannot be solved by arithmetic.

Take this case. A man is negotiating to go into business with three different partners at once. Before shaking the coins he does not tell you which hexagram refers to which partner. He shakes fifteen times — five per partner — and asks: with which of the three can I actually make money?

Can you, using liuyao, sort those fifteen hexagrams into three groups of five, such that each group is exactly the “will I make money with this particular partner” question?

Some students will think I am being unfair to liuyao. I am not. If the theory you are using is scientific and correct, this is trivial — a matter of turning your hand over. If the theory you are using is wrong, then it is harder than climbing to heaven.

Any “liuyao theory” whatsoever can be dissected to the bone with those two blades. Any swindler-master and any swindler-theory will stand exposed in five minutes. And if you dare not — or would rather not — apply those two blades to the theory you learned and the theory you teach, then you have only one road left: the road of the teacher who cheats, and you will never arrive anywhere.

So where is the truth?

Having said all that, some students will ask: then where is the true liuyao theory?

I can tell you with absolute certainty.

The true liuyao theory is Golden Policies and The Orthodox of Divination.

Of all the predictive traditions China has handed down over a thousand years, only liuyao has no congenital disability, no fatal flaw built in at birth. Only liuyao is, in this sense, complete.

Consider the alternatives.

Bazi. From the day it was born, bazi has been unable to account for the “five-fold identicals” — people born in the same year, month, day, hour and of the same sex, whose lives nonetheless differ. That is not a marginal objection. It is the first question anyone asks.

Feng shui. Apart from the sitting-direction and fenjin (分金, the fine graduation of the compass) method — whose practical value is real but narrow — every other feng shui theory has almost no operational grip. This, incidentally, is the real reason feng shui has circulated for a thousand years while its masters have produced nothing beyond fenjin. If the fenjin theory were as precise and as decisive as the masters claim, there would not be an unlucky person left on earth, because every house and every grave is built to the best available sitting-direction and fenjin. The facts slap the feng shui masters in the face daily. “Useful and true” feng shui theory is very thin on the ground — that is traditional feng shui's fatal flaw.

Qimen Dunjia. From the moment it was founded, qimen has carried an unresolved quarrel: whether to intercalate the leap month when setting up the chart (置润 zhirun versus 不置润 buzhirun), and whether to use the fixed-palace method (排宫 paigong) or the flying-palace method (飞宫 feigong). Four founding patriarchs could not settle it between them. A predictive theory whose own basic set-up is still in dispute also carries a fatal flaw.

These flaws have gone largely unaddressed for centuries, and few people are capable of addressing them.

Liuyao, put under the same scalpel, shows only a few blemishes. Remove those blemishes and what remains is a liuyao theory that is both luminous and astonishingly accurate.

The least useful parts of the tradition

1. The theory of flourishing and declining (旺衰 wangshuai).

In the genuine tradition, wangshuai is mentioned in passing. It exists as a concept; it functions as a background factor. In the whole body of traditional liuyao literature, discussion of wangshuai occupies under 4% of the text, while over 90% is devoted to combinations and transformations — how lines combine, clash, move and change one another.

Which tells you plainly: the ancients did not primarily weigh strength. They primarily weighed the combinatorial relationships among the lines. The ancients worked that way, and we moderns overrule them, doing violence to the old books and the old theory. That is how ignorant we have become.

You can throw wangshuai out entirely and still read with 100% accuracy — provided, of course, that you have first understood how the lines combine and transform.

2. The theory of spirit-killers (神煞 shensha).

The genuine tradition already states it plainly: the transformations of the shensha are endless, and not worth the single principle of the five elements generating and controlling one another. The ancients had already rejected shensha. They treated it as a background factor at most. We cling to what they discarded. In the authentic corpus, shensha occupies no more than 3% of the text — which tells you what the tradition thought it was worth.

Practice confirms it. Shensha alone cannot produce a reading. The five elements and the Six Relations alone, with no shensha whatever, produce 100% accurate readings.

3. Confucian-moral and folk-jianghu judgement formulas.

The tradition also contains verdicts evolved out of moral convention and marketplace lore. They amount to about 3% of the corpus, and they are the part that does the most damage to accuracy — the reason readings come out uncannily right on one hexagram and wildly off on the next. These formulas are treated at length in my Complete Theory of Liuyao Prediction, in the sections analysing the verdicts of Golden Policies and The Orthodox of Divination. I will not repeat that here.

The parts that block a student's progress

1. “Never a fourth hexagram” (卦不过三).

Traditional liuyao holds that the hexagram is a divine instrument, that the same matter may not be asked twice, and that a repeat inquiry will not be answered — ask again and the spirit will not tell you.

In fact, repeated readings disagree because the reading theory contains errors, not because the spirit has fallen silent. But because we were taught “never a fourth hexagram,” our thinking was fenced in. We assumed the fault lay with the spirit rather than with the theory, and so we lost every opportunity to discover which parts of the theory were wrong. That is why accuracy never reached 100%.

2. “Sincerity makes it work” (心诚则灵).

Traditional liuyao holds that the hexagram is accurate only if the querent shakes the coins with a sincere heart. In fact, all the querent needs to do is concentrate for a moment and hold the question in mind. Whether the hexagram is accurate is decided by the reader's theory.

When a reading fails, we blame the querent's sincerity. That is self-deception. If your skill were high and your theory correct, then before reading the querent's hexagram you would shake one yourself, sincerely, and ask “was this querent sincere when he shook?” — and only then decide whether to proceed. Nobody does that. So let me say it without manners: a failed reading is your theory's fault, not the querent's.

When the querent shakes, it is the reader's job to keep reminding him to concentrate. If you did not remind him, what kind of reader are you? And if you did remind him and he was still distracted, why read the hexagram at all?

This “sincerity” doctrine has done real damage. It stopped us from studying the principles of the hexagram in depth, and that is why a man can study divination his whole life and still die unable to read with certainty. It is also why certain masters now drag out a “uncertainty principle” to excuse their own ignorance. (The uncertainty principle, properly understood, says that no predictive theory can ever resolve the finest details with perfect precision. It does not say that being wrong is correct and scientific. A theory that cannot even get the direction of an event right — is that still a theory?)

3. No sense of what to look at first.

Traditional liuyao, when analysing the combinations among lines, grabs everything at once — eyebrows and beard in the same fist — and never seizes the snake at the seven inches.

The habit is to look at the yongshen, then at the yuanshen (the line that generates it), then at the jishen and choushen (the lines that control and obstruct it). That is not a method. It is the absence of a method — a disordered mind dressed up as thoroughness.

Here is why. In a reading, the yongshen is the crux. Hold it and nothing else. Establish the relationship between the yongshen and the one line that represents the actual querent; then establish whether the month pillar, the day pillar, the moving lines and the transformed lines have damaged the closeness or distance between those two. Do that, and the verdict is out — with certainty. There is no need to ask which line is the yuanshen, which the jishen, which the choushen.

It is like a battle. To know whether you will win, you first analyse the generating, controlling, combining and clashing relationship between your army (the yongshen) and yourself. Then you analyse the relationship between your army and the other armies (the month pillar, the day pillar, the moving lines, the transformed lines) — and whether those other armies have broken the link between your army and you.

For an auspicious matter: if the yongshen is combined with you, but the yongshen is itself damaged by the month pillar, day pillar, moving lines or transformed lines — through combination, clash, entombment in the storage vault, or transformation into something spoiled — then your good outcome is gone. Same if you are the one damaged.

Therefore, in a liuyao reading, the words yuanshen, jishen and choushen never need to enter your head at all. Work in this order: the relation of the yongshen to you; then whether the yongshen has been damaged by month, day, moving lines, transformed lines; then whether you have been damaged. The verdict falls out with certainty. The tradition's failure to prioritise is a serious drag on both simplicity and accuracy.

4. No clear active–passive relation.

Traditional liuyao never states who acts and who is acted upon. The result is that a student can never answer the basic question: which line can affect which other line, and which cannot?

Once you understand the rule, the questions dissolve. The rule is: the month pillar and the day pillar can combine with, clash with, punish, harm, generate and control any line; no line can do any of those things to the month or day pillar. A moving line can do them to other moving lines and to any still line; a still line cannot do them to a moving line.

With that in hand, three questions answer themselves: What is the relation between the yongshen and me? Between the yongshen and the month, day, moving and transformed lines? Between me and the month, day, moving and transformed lines? Prediction becomes simple, and it becomes accurate.

And note: Golden Policies and The Orthodox of Divination already state the active–passive relation quite clearly. It is the students who have looked without seeing and listened without hearing.

5. The miraculous on-the-spot verdict, sorted by category.

The tradition's catalogues of “iron-mouth” verdicts (铁口直断) — one list for illness, one for lawsuits, one for travel — have badly obstructed students.

Because the power of an on-the-spot verdict does not come from the formula. It comes from knowing how the human matter actually works. If you know no medicine, you may recite the illness formulas backwards and you will still never call a diagnosis on the spot. If you do not understand the launch sequence and basic principles of a satellite, you may have the formulas at your fingertips and you will never say on the spot where in the launch the fault lies. If you know nothing of fishing, the formulas may be carved into your brain and you will never say on the spot what happened out on the water.

The formulas are information markers. The on-the-spot verdict is what you derive when those markers are bound tightly to the actual process of the human affair. The tradition's lists make students forget that principle — they learn the markers and skip the binding.

What remains

Apart from these errors, Golden Policies and The Orthodox of Divination are true word for word and true sentence for sentence.

And the swindler-masters, knowing nothing, unable to read accurately and desperate for money and fame, invent new liuyao theories — at the risk of the shortened life and crippled body that folk belief promises anyone who fabricates divination lore. It is a contemptible trade. It misleads students, and it does real damage to the inheritance and refinement of liuyao theory.

The truth of liuyao theory is in Golden Policies and The Orthodox of Divination.

Strip out the parts that cannot survive the scalpel — objective, realistic, materialist, dialectical, scientific — and every remaining sentence in those two books is predictive truth, accurate to the last degree.

With those true verdicts you can read with 100% accuracy. You can ask the same question hundreds and thousands of times and get the same answer every time. You can take fifteen hexagrams and sort them into three groups of five, each group answering for one specific partner. And if you also understand how human affairs work, then with those true methods you can deliver the verdict on the spot, every time.