Where Is the Real Theory of Liuyao Prediction?

Translator's note. Published in 2023, six years after “Where Is the Truth in Liuyao Prediction Theory?”, this essay is the author's own answer to the question his earlier piece raised. Where the earlier article cleared the ground — rejecting “new liuyao” schools and returning to Golden Policies and The Orthodox of Divination — this one names seven specific defects he believes have kept liuyao hovering between accurate and inaccurate for five millennia, and presents his own system as the repair. Two of the seven are technical terms he treats as proprietary: shishi dongyao (事实动爻, “the factual moving line”) and waiying (外应, “external correspondence,” the omen that arrives while the question is being asked). The original closes with enrolment details for his course; we have condensed that section to a note.

Liuyao reads heaven above, earth below, and human affairs in between. It is the great root method of the Chinese predictive tradition, and one of the techniques any professional reader is expected to command.

And yet for five thousand years hexagram divination has sat in the gap between accurate and inaccurate — never able to promise precision. Generation after generation of talented men studied and innovated, and in essence none of them solved the problem.

Why not? Why could five thousand years of the best minds, thinking as hard as men can think, not break through?

The plain answer is that they never settled the foundational question: what is liuyao prediction actually made of?

Here is why that question is decisive.

1. It has only ever worked in the time system

Five thousand years of hexagram divination has turned inside the time system alone. But every person, thing and event in this world, from arising to perishing, exists inside a unified field of time and spatial environment. Any predictive theory that hopes to reason precisely must fuse time with the thing and its environment. Walk on one leg and throw the spatial dimension away — how do you expect precision?

2. It is saturated with philosophy, when human affairs run on physics

Five thousand years of liuyao theory is stuffed with philosophical schematics. But things in this world do not arise, develop and change according to philosophical principles. The laws of physics and the laws of philosophy are not equivalent and not aligned. In fact 99% of how any given thing changes is physics, not philosophy.

When you carry philosophical rhetoric — the kind designed to impress rather than to describe — into a predictive model whose real substrate is physical law, you have crippled its precision at the root. Put plainly: philosophical principle is not physical law, and human affairs change by physical law, not by philosophical law.

3. Nobody has understood the diviner's own energy field

Five thousand years of liuyao theory has never settled the question of how far the diviner's own energy field reaches.

Everyone agrees that “the hexagram can be asked about anything.” Almost nobody grasps that “the hexagram can be asked about anything” does not mean “the diviner can read anything.” A reader who has mastered wealth and career questions may still fail on a missing-person case.

Still fewer grasp this: even with a theory that is 100% correct, a reader can read precisely only within the range his own energy field covers — never outside it. You will never read the affairs of a country's president with accuracy. You will never read the fate of a person who has no connection to you at all.

4. Nobody has understood what “accuracy” means

Five thousand years of liuyao has never resolved this: accuracy means predicting the state a matter will take under given conditions. It does not mean predicting the second result that appears after the querent learns the first prediction and deliberately changes the conditions.

Because nobody grasped this, we inherited the famous paradox of Shao Kangjie and the bird. A transcendent being holds a small bird in his closed hand and asks Shao to predict whether the bird will live or die. Whatever Shao answers, the being can make it false — crush the bird, or open the hand and let it fly. Shao had no answer. For a thousand years, men who understood nothing have used “the immortal tested Shao Kangjie” as a stick to beat hexagram divination with. (The full reasoning is in my essay “What Is Prediction, Really?” on the Shikong Zuobiao account.)

The same confusion produces the common claim that “gambling is hard to predict.” And it produces this absurdity: a querent asks whether a venture will succeed; the reading says yes; the venture does not happen; the querent announces that the prediction failed. But the venture did not fail — he never did the thing. Ask about a thing and never do it, and where is success or failure to be found?

At this point some clever fellow will ask: then why didn't you predict that he wouldn't do it? A fair question. If you had asked that, it could be answered precisely. But under normal circumstances everyone assumes that a man who asks, and who receives an auspicious reading, will go and act. That is an error of business judgement, and it has nothing to do with whether the theory is sound.

5. Nobody has understood external correspondence

Five thousand years of liuyao has never settled the relation between the hexagram and external correspondence (waiying). Ninety-five percent of masters ignore it ninety-five percent of the time — they do not observe it, or do not know how. And once the root principle heaven's omen outranks the hexagram is thrown away, the standard result is exactly what practitioners complain of: “however I read this hexagram it comes out the same way, and the facts turn out otherwise.”

Study hexagrams without mastering waiying and you will circle outside the gate forever.

6. Nobody has understood the factual moving line

Five thousand years of liuyao has never recognised the factual moving line (shishi dongyao) — what my school treats as the tradition's buried master key.

In a reading, the factual moving line decides the precision of the whole analysis, 100%. Its energy far exceeds that of any moving or transformed line in the hexagram, and indeed far exceeds that of the four governing time values. Once a factual moving line appears, the entire analysis reorganises around it. Whether you cast a moving hexagram or a still one, if the matter asked about binds to the hexagram and produces a factual moving line, then that line is the hexagram's president — everything answers to it.

(The factual moving line is a theory transmitted privately within liuyao for five thousand years. It is taught only in person.)

7. Nobody has separated the verdict from the process

Five thousand years of liuyao has lumped together two different techniques: predicting the outcome (auspicious or inauspicious, success or failure), and predicting the detailed process by which the matter unfolds. The consequence is that many masters reason in confusion and end up relying on experience or outright guesswork.

In fact, the reasoning that yields the outcome is different from the reasoning that yields the process about 90% of the time. Only when you hold those two modes of thought clearly apart can you do both — outcome and process — with full accuracy.

Otherwise you get the strange split every practitioner knows: the process is read correctly and the outcome is wrong; or the process is a mess of errors and the outcome is exactly right.

What follows

Those seven are the root reasons liuyao has never achieved precision in five thousand years, and the root reason it is “easy to enter and hard to master.” Any liuyao school that solves those seven theoretical obstacles will dominate. Any student who learns a liuyao theory that has genuinely solved them will sweep the field.

After thirty-eight years of research, the system I have built — the Lü Wenyi Natural-Science Liuyao Prediction System — resolves all seven at the root.

It has two halves.

The first is the reading of outcome — auspicious or inauspicious, success or failure. Will the matter be accomplished? Will the missing person be found? Will the illness be cured? Will there be a prison sentence? Will the person die?

The second is the reading of process detail — the specific things that will occur between the matter's arising and its result.

In both, the factual moving line and external correspondence are fused into the analysis at every step, so that precision does not slip and no conclusion is off. With this system, the same matter can be asked hundreds and thousands of times and produce the same outcome every time — while the different hexagrams fill in the process in greater and greater detail.

For a professional reader, command of an accurate liuyao technique matters, because each predictive art has its proper range. Bazi is poorly suited to the details of a single event's success or failure; liuyao excels at exactly that. Feng shui is worse still for single events. Liuyao, by contrast, can be asked about anything — and can also recover the important details of how the matter will unfold.

From the editor. The remainder of the original article is a course announcement: an online module on outcome reading, a three-day in-person module on process detail (including the factual moving line and external correspondence), held in Beijing or in Shijiazhuang, Hebei or Yuncheng, Shanxi in November 2023, with fees and a registration contact. We have omitted the commercial details; readers who want them can reach the author through the channels listed on this site.