Why Do Students of the Yijing Keep Getting Cheated by the Masters?

Translator's note. This essay is written for Chinese readers inside a specific ecosystem — the yixue training market, where teachers sell courses and “masters” sell remedies — and it assumes familiarity with a few things an outside reader will not have. Sima Nan (司马南) is a well-known Chinese broadcaster who spent decades publicly debunking qigong healers, fortune-tellers and other claimants to supernatural power; he is the figure the professors in this essay are arguing against. The “New School, Old School, Blind School” mentioned near the end are the three main lineages in modern Chinese fate calculation: the twentieth-century reformers, the classical tradition, and mangpai, the blind masters' tradition, transmitted orally among blind practitioners. The essay's argument, however, does not depend on any of this: it is about why people believe what they are told.

Why do people who study the Yijing keep getting cheated by the masters?

You may think you know why. I doubt you do.

One: the masters are, in fact, frauds. Deal with them and you will be cheated.

Two: from your own side. There are four reasons.

(a) You have too little scientific knowledge, so you cannot read the theories you are learning through a scientific lens. Without science you are easy to cheat.

People say feng shui is in your genes. If you knew what a gene is, you would not be taken in. If you knew what feng shui is, you would not believe in “cosmic feng shui.” Take the nano water cup: if you knew what nano means, you would not buy one. The whole country bought these things because nobody knows what a quantum is, and so people believe in quantum clothing and quantum cups. Insufficient science is enough to get you cheated.

(b) A severe lack of logical reasoning. Whatever someone tells you, you believe. You do not put questions.

Of all the deficits in our culture this is the one. From antiquity to the present, we have not reasoned logically. We open our mouths and it is qu lei bi xiang — “assign by category, infer by analogy.” Analogy has its uses. But inference is a far more powerful instrument.

Take doors facing doors. A master says doors facing doors is inauspicious, and you believe it. Reason for a moment and you would ask: a toilet door facing a kitchen door — is that bad for the toilet, or bad for the kitchen? A kitchen door facing a bedroom door — bad for the kitchen, or for the bedroom? Does a kitchen door in the east facing west give the same result as the reverse? Why is it that cinemas, theatres and shopping malls all have doors facing doors, and the government says that is auspicious, and the scientists say so too — try opening a shop without doors facing doors and see whether they let you trade.

Two or three questions and you know they are wrong. Make inference a habit. This is the second reason students of the Yijing get cheated.

(c) You believe people instead of looking at the facts.

Your teacher says something and you believe it. Why not look at the facts? The facts are sitting right there and you do not look at them. You believe the teacher. And students of the Yijing are mostly this kind of person.

Here is an example. Two professors — one from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one from the Shandong Academy — once debated feng shui with Sima Nan. Sima Nan asked: how do you prove that feng shui is a science? The professor from Shandong said: in Jinan I read a site for a man. There was a crossroads to the northwest. I told him his company would go bankrupt and he would go to prison. And that is what happened.

Does that strike you as a precise hit? A crossroads to the northwest, therefore bankruptcy and prison?

Sima Nan's mind is a sharp instrument — though on the Yijing I do not rate him above me. If I were Sima Nan, I would have taken journalists to Jinan and surveyed every business with a crossroads to its northwest, and seen whether every one of them had gone bankrupt and every owner had gone to prison. Look at the facts and you know.

But the professor said it, and so a great many people believe that Water in the northwest is bad — qian being Metal in the eight trigrams, the Water drains the Metal, inauspicious. As a theory it is not unreasonable. Why not look at the facts?

So from your own side: we believe what the teacher says instead of looking at the facts. And do not be persuaded because what I say sounds reasonable. Reasonable is not enough. Objective fact does not necessarily follow reason.

Mathematics is reasonable, and mathematics still has problems. An American olympiad once set this question: fold a sheet of paper a certain number of times, how many creases do you get? One child won, but not with full marks. The child asked which question he had got wrong. The experts told him: this one. The child said, you don't need to calculate — let me fold it, and you count. The mathematicians' formula and the actual creases differed by one edge. To this day mathematicians do not know why.

Even mathematics and physical fact can fail to agree. So how could a crowd of fortune-tellers be right about everything?

(d) Greed undoes you — greed to learn more, greed to learn faster, greed to get rich now.

Beyond the first three, the fourth is a weakness of human nature.

The first greed: the more the better. Most students of the Yijing want to know everything — the New School, the Old School, the Blind School, all of it. Are you a god? Can you master that much? You have not got the capacity.

The second greed: the faster the better. Someone says he will make you a master in three days, and you believe him. Can you grow a sapling into a towering tree in three days? Everything in this world, from arising to developing to changing, proceeds by a process, and a process takes time. Nothing produces a result in an instant — a science least of all. How could anyone become a master in three days? I say ten days and a man tells me he has no time. Another master says three days and off he goes. He was greedy for speed.

The third greed: getting rich. Because you are in a hurry to use this theory to make money, the moment someone says fast, says more, you walk into the trap. A fraud in Shenzhen told his students: study my theory and I guarantee you a million in three months. Last year the students he had cheated joined forces and sued him in Shenzhen. How does studying fortune-telling earn you a million in three months?

Wanting to be rich is not wrong. But the attitude has to be right, and you need the notion of going slowly.

Money that arrives all at once can kill you. Hand you ten or twenty thousand and drop it from a rooftop a little at a time, and you will be fine — you might even get rich. Bundle it up, a ton of it, and drop it from the roof in one go: can you catch it? It depends on what your chart can carry. If you can carry five kilograms, then drop it five kilograms at a time; a ton takes two hundred drops. Drop it once and the money was yours, and so was the death.

So on the question of making money, think about how to make it according to what your own chart can bear. If greed has blinded your eyes and clouded your judgement, then being cheated is settled in advance.

These are the reasons students of the Yijing have been cheated for so many years. I believe that after you leave here you will never be cheated by a Yijing master again. And if you are, I hope this was the last stop.

Someone once asked a teacher: what is a foolish man? The teacher said: a man who trips twice over the same stone in the same place.

How many times have you tripped? I suspect more than twice. Most of the people who come to me have been cheated by Yijing frauds until they were nearly bankrupt. I could not cheat you now if I tried.