Reflections: Thoughts After Recent Consultations, Part 2

AI translated from the original Chinese.

Generated by Gemini

Continued from the previous article

2. Is destiny fixed?

The Southern Song poet 方岳 (Fang Yue) wrote a plain yet elegant poem whose lines everyone should know:

"Farewell to Commander Zicai"

Eight or nine things in ten go against our wishes, yet there are not two or three people to tell them to. Since I came to know Zicai of Jingmen, I dream of riding iron horses to battle south of the city.

The first two lines, "eight or nine things in ten go against our wishes, yet there are not two or three people to tell them to," lack the ineffable charm of Tang poetry, but their plain words say everything about how one feels when life is hard.

Life inevitably brings difficulties. I remember that twenty years ago it was because I felt lost about the future in graduate school that I threw myself into studying Zi Wei Dou Shu. I hoped Zi Wei Dou Shu could be a mirror of time through which to glimpse the future and so change it. Did it work?

In my first eight years of studying Dou Shu on my own, I read many Dou Shu books, from the so-called Northern school, Southern school, Plum Blossom school, Divination school, Zhongzhou school... I came into contact with nearly all of them. I kept thinking there might be a secret manual setting out every miraculous method, so that one reading would open all my meridians and I could foresee everything. So whenever I heard of a secret Zi Wei Dou Shu manual somewhere, I did everything I could to get it. But apart from the classics, these so-called secret manuals were nearly all the same. Occasionally a Dou Shu book would set out some clever methods of interpretation, but mostly it was theory on paper, with very few explanations of real cases. Isn't the point of fate reading to prove that the "method" is correct? With a pile of empty theory, how can you prove these methods really foretell a lifetime's fortunes and misfortunes?

When I came across Master 紫雲 (Zi Yun)'s books, I finally saw a road I might travel, because all of his works are structured around discussions of real cases. Only with cases can a theory be shown to be correct. That is also why most articles on 《斗數漫步》 (Wandering in Dou Shu) are written around real cases. If I only wrote:

• With 紫微 (Zi Wei) in the Life Palace, such and such will happen
• With 貪狼 (Tan Lang) in the Spouse Palace, such and such will happen
• With 廉貞 (Lian Zhen) in the Career Palace, such and such will happen

at most it would prove I'm familiar with the theory, but not that the theory works. Dou Shu books on the market are mostly like this: without discussing real cases, how can they prove the theory is right?

Only with cases as evidence can Dou Shu theory be shown to be valid. But that also leads to a misconception, which is the topic I want to discuss: is destiny fixed? Let's think this question through:

Many people are born at the same time as us, and people born at the same time have the same chart. Yet we all know that no two people's destinies are exactly alike. So is destiny fixed? For me, the course of destiny falls into two kinds:

• First: what we can choose, such as marriage, work, buying a house...
• Second: what we cannot choose, such as traffic accidents, illness, mishaps...

Master 紫雲 stresses again and again in his books: what you see in a chart won't necessarily happen, but what happens can always be seen. That's exactly right. Because each person born in the same hour triggers different points of destiny, each has a different life.

I once searched high and low for people born at the same time, and I actually found a pair: one a well-known actress, the other an astrologer. They had the same chart but different destinies. Why? Different environments created different lives, which is enough to prove that destiny is not fixed.

If destiny isn't fixed, then what is the point of a reading? Setting aside what we can't choose, such as accidents, illness and mishaps, the only thing we can do is choose carefully when facing a decision. The purpose of a reading is, when facing a decision, to project the outcomes of each choice and pick the best one.

So when discussing your chart, don't ask:

Can I get married? Can I buy a house?...

I will answer: "Whether you can is for you to decide." But you can ask:

How might things develop after I marry this person? What might my living situation be after I buy a house?

Questions like these give us something to discuss. Either way, one can almost say there is "no absolutely perfect choice," only "the choice you can relatively accept." After all, life isn't perfect: turn left and you may get rained on, turn right and you may face a sandstorm. If you can better accept the result of turning left, go left; if you can better accept the result of turning right, go right.

Life is built from an endless series of choices, and through them we unfold different destinies. So if you want to ask whether destiny is really fixed, I'll answer: "What has happened in the past was fated, and your future is full of choices." Facing the unknown destiny ahead, there is surely a part we can choose, surely a part we can unfold. What is past is past; as for the life still to come, destiny is by no means fixed.