Chiyang Daoren, Eastern Taoism
Fortune-telling and divination are mysterious cultural phenomena shared by every country in the world, reflecting humanity's desire to know its unknown fate.
The predictive arts of the East have a long history and are profound and subtle. Foremost among China's fortune-telling methods is BaZi (Four Pillars of Destiny) fortune-telling, also called “Ziping BaZi fortune-telling,” or simply “the Ziping art.” It is a method of calculating the course of a person's whole life from four points in time at birth: the year, month, day, and hour.
The core of BaZi fortune-telling is the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches of the year, month, day, and hour, known for short as the “Four Pillars.”
So where did the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches come from? Legend says that in remote antiquity the Yellow Emperor and Chiyou fought a great war at Zhuolu. Although the Yellow Emperor defeated Chiyou, his own people suffered terrible losses—“a million floating corpses.” The Yellow Emperor felt things could not go on this way, for the nation was about to fall apart, so he kowtowed several times to Heaven.
After that, the ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches appeared in the sky. The ten Heavenly Stems: Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin, Ren, Gui. The twelve Earthly Branches: Zi, Chou, Yin, Mao, Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Xu, Hai.
The Yellow Emperor also put forward the idea that “heaven is round and earth is square”: “heaven is round” corresponds to the ten Heavenly Stems and “earth is square” to the twelve Earthly Branches. This is the earliest origin of the stems and branches.
Later a man named Da Nao arranged the ten Heavenly Stems and twelve Earthly Branches in matched combinations, pairing them starting from Jia Zi. As we all know, the least common multiple of 10 and 12 is 60, and so there arose the “sixty-pair cycle” (the sixty-year cycle, or jiazi) (Jia Zi, Yi Chou, Bing Yin, Ding Mao, Wu Chen … all the way to Gui Hai, exactly 60 pairs in all). This was Da Nao's contribution; you can read through the order of the sixty pairs yourself.
Who first used the stems and branches to calculate destiny? In the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods there was a very famous man called Guiguzi. Guiguzi created a method of calculating destiny called the “Two-Headed Pincers.” How did it work? For example, if this year is a Yi Si year, one takes Yi Hai as the upper trigram and Ding Hai as the lower trigram, and after casting the hexagram one calculates good and ill fortune for the person.
Around the Spring and Autumn period there appeared a book called the Book of Documents (Shangshu), which first mentioned the concept of the Five Elements—Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth. Later people further described the properties of these five substances, such as “fire flames upward, water moistens downward.”
From the properties of these five substances, nearly everything can be classed under Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth. From this it is not hard to see that the Five Elements stand in relations of “mutual generation and mutual control,” and that this is a natural law of all things.
With mutual generation and control, the Five Elements were no longer a mere classification of substances but formed a flowing set of relations, in which they both promote and give rise to one another and also restrain and obstruct one another.
By observing natural phenomena such as the rising and setting of the sun and the turning of the four seasons, the ancients found that the changes of all things follow the law of the unity of opposites. From this they drew up the theory of yin and yang, to explain the laws by which all things in the universe arise, develop, and change: interrelated things or phenomena all have opposing attributes.
This philosophical theory of yin and yang sums up the following characteristics of all things:
Unity of opposites: yin and yang are both opposed and interdependent; without yin there is no yang.
Mutual restraint: yin and yang hold each other in check; when yin prevails there is cold, when yang prevails there is heat.
Mutual transformation: under certain conditions yin can transform into yang and vice versa (as in “extreme cold turns to heat, and extreme heat gives rise to cold”).
Interaction and mutual rooting: the interaction of the two qi of yin and yang is the source from which all things are generated; “lone yin cannot give birth, solitary yang cannot grow.”
Relativity: yin and yang attributes are not absolute but relative, a matter of comparison, and they change as conditions change.
Infinite divisibility: there is yang within yin and yin within yang, divisible without end.
Dynamic change: yin and yang are not static concepts but keep their balance amid constant change.
As the theory of yin and yang came to be widely applied, the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches naturally came to carry yin and yang attributes, and the theory was naturally absorbed into the basic theory of BaZi fortune-telling.
At this point the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches had their Five Elements and their yin and yang attributes, and the core theoretical building blocks of BaZi were essentially complete.
In the Han dynasty a great scholar named Wang Chong proposed that every person, at the moment of birth, receives the breath of heaven and earth. He held that before birth, while still in the mother's womb, a person comes into contact with a kind of “qi,” and that the first breath of nature taken after birth also belongs to this “qi.” This “qi” determines the important basic elements of a life: how long one will live, whether one will be long-lived, whether one will be wealthy and noble.
Wang Chong's “theory of endowed qi” enriched the theory of BaZi fortune-telling. Some may think, though, that “this is nonsense”—where would such a qi come from? In fact it can be understood like this: how tall and large a tree can grow is decided while it is still a seed; how large a potato can grow and whether it will taste good is also fixed when it is a seed. Coming back to people: whether you are tall, whether you are sturdy, whether you are healthy, is in fact decided in the womb—what we now call “genes.” Seen from this angle, Wang Chong's “theory of endowed qi” has some truth to it.
He also held that not only people but animals have this “qi”—this “qi of first contact with nature” is called “endowed qi.”
In the Tang dynasty, when nations from all over came to pay tribute, the fortune-telling theories of many countries also reached the Tang, creating a great “hodgepodge and exchange.” At that time there was a man skilled in yin and yang and the Five Elements who could calculate a person's destiny from the “month, day, stem, and hour” of birth, predicting whether the person would be poor or lowly, healthy or not—and his calculations were especially accurate. This was in fact already the embryonic form of BaZi. In practice, it combined the stems and branches, yin and yang and the Five Elements, and the theory of endowed qi, calculating from the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches of the year, month, day, and hour of birth.
The true founder of BaZi fortune-telling proper was Li Xuzhong of the Tang dynasty. Later, the “Ziping” we so often speak of created the “Ziping method.” What is the Ziping method like? An example: James Watt did not invent the steam engine; he became famous for improving the linked-action steam engine. Ziping was similar: he perfected the method of calculating destiny against the background of the Song dynasty. In the Song, royal power was centralized, and people regarded the month pillar as “the court” and “the sovereign,” so only the day pillar could be used to represent “oneself.”
Once the day pillar represented oneself, on what basis did the Ziping method read destiny? On the clashes, harms, punishments, controls, generations, and transformations of the Five Elements and yin and yang—these relations are the core.
With this, the system and application of Chinese BaZi fortune-telling were essentially complete.