Divination (III) (Mystery)

5. 占星(zhan4 xing) Astrology:  In ancient China, astrology was also used to forecast a country or an emperor’s future. A lot of emperors had astrologers as their counselors. They monitored closely for the relative positions or movements of the celestial bodies.

It is also used as a form of fortune-telling for individuals. 紫薇斗數(zi3 wei2 dou3 shu4) is probably the most well-known system. It is the study of a person’s life based on the movement and location of the Zi Wei Star and other stars at the specific time the person was born.

6. 占夢(zhan mong4) Dream interpretation: Speaking of interpreting a dream, you have to know a book called 周公解夢(zhou gong jie3meng4), which consists of interpretations of seven kinds of dreams and is passed along with anonymous authors. As I know, it has nothing to do with the historic figure周公. But in the Chinese language, we often use the term “夢周公” (meng4 zhou gong) to refer to sleeping.  

7. 八字相命(ba zhi4 xiang4 ming4)  Four Pillars of Destiny: It’s telling one’s personality and fate by his 八字, “eight characters of birth time.” It’s called “eight characters” because each of the four pillars (representing the year, month, day, and hour of one's birth respectively) is represented by two characters. It shows the relative position of the sun when one was born. Philosophy of陰陽五行(yin yang2 wu3 xing2),Yin & Yang, the Five Elements (gold, wood, water, fire, earth) are utilized in telling one’s fortune here.   

8. 易經卜卦(yi4 jing bu3 gua4)：易經，the Classic of Changes, one of the oldest texts, contains a divination system. 八卦(ba gua4), referred to as "trigrams" in English, is eight diagrams used in Taoist cosmology to represent the fundamental principles of reality, seen as a range of eight interrelated concepts. The eight trigrams are extended into 64. One of the ways to divine is flip three coins to get different head -tail combinations, each of which represents one of the 64 trigrams. The trigram is interpreted according to易經as a prediction for the future.

9. Animal: Some people use animal to divine. For example, I’ve seen birds do the job. You ask a question then the bird picks up an answer for you. I heard that roosters are used too.  You might want to see this on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcS0AWB8wzA&feature=related  

A friend told me that by chance he once got a “book” of his destiny, which records important occurrences of his life. He read it until the part to the end of that year. He stopped there because he didn’t have the nerves to go on. Some event, though seen much unlikely when he was reading it, really came true later.

For thousands of years, people have been trying very hard to have a peep into the future. We’re always wondering what will happen tomorrow or further ahead, or sometimes we’re just too confused or too weak to decide which way to go. So we resort to an old mysterious way, divination.

I think it’s good to know the weather forecast as to decide what to wear or if you should go out with an umbrella. But foreseeing the future, like who you’re gonna marry or when you’re gonna die?

I think I’ll do the same if I should have the chance to get my “book” as the friend mentioned above. I don’t think I’ll open and read it. Like a Hong Kong science fiction novelist 倪匡(ni2 kuang) put in one of his novels, what is the fun of life if you live it like reading yesterday’s newspaper?

(THE END)

紫薇斗數=紫薇斗数

周公解夢=周公解梦

陰陽五行=阴阳五行

易經=易经

Divination (II) (Mystery)

My friends did not divine the way those Shang Emperors had. There’re many other ways to do it these days. I’ll give some as I’ve seen or heard.

1. In my previous writing “Bwa3-bui 跋杯” on 04/23/2011, I talked a lot about the practice of using a pair of crescent-shaped, wood or bamboo-made utensil to ask deities questions in the temples. This is one of the commonest ways to divine, often accompanied with the act of 抽籤(cho qian), lot drawing. Please refer to my old writing for the details.

2. 扶乩(fu2 ji):  Usually it’s a ritual practiced in the temple by someone who is “possessed” by a god or an immortal. The messages are conveyed through a spirit writing usually using a stick in sand or incense ashes. The characters have to be read and interpreted by someone who is capable of doing this. Long ago I’ve been to a ritual of this and watched it. I didn’t ask any questions, but I remember the process vividly. I picked up one from YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptzZ_2f-Kh8, though it’s not exactly the same as I’ve seen, it’s basically the same thing.

3. 相術(xiang4 shu4) Physiognomy: Fortune-tellers foretell someone’s future by watching his face, features, palm, figure, or 氣(qi4) . . , etc. Some even do this by watching his moles or feeling his wrist bone, which is called 摸骨(mo gu3) in Taiwan.  

4. 測字(ce4 zi4) Literomancy: The literomancer tells someone’s future by the Chinese character and the subject the client gives. To do this, you have to know a lot about the Chinese characters. I goolged and found an example like this, which I’m not sure about the authenticity but just give you an idea what literomancy is like:

Giving the word天(tian), a girl asks if she will marry her boyfriend that she’s been seeing for a couple of years. The literomancer gives a positive answer since the word can be separated into 二(er4), two and人(ren2), person. You put two persons together and it turns into 天. If you extend one of the strokes, 天turns into 夫(fu), which means husband.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

抽籤=抽签

相術=相术

氣=气

測字-测字

Divination (I) (Mystery)

Two friends of mine recently have tried divination respectively. One is indecisive if she should retire; the other wants to know if her husband should go to China for a career change.

A couple of weeks ago I read about how divination占卜(zhan bu3) and worship of ancestors had taken most of the time of China’s emperors in Shang Dynasty (1600 BC–1046 BC). With a gap of some three thousand years and Armstrong’s first step onto the moon, funny that divination is still with us. I’m not saying this judgmentally. I’m more of curious about this.

On a summer day of 1899¹, author and scholar 劉鶚(liu2 e4) went to a Chinese herbal medicine pharmacy in Beijing to get something for his friend Wang suffering from malaria. When the pharmacist was pounding the medicine, 龍骨(long2 gu3), dragon’s bones, which refers to fossils of mammals, such as elephants, rhinos, cattle, etc., Liu saw a certain script similar to Chinese characters on the bone.

Later Liu and Wang went around Beijing’s pharmacies and bought all the “dragon’s bones.” 1058 strange old characters, older than anything that had been known, were found on these bones.

Liu made public his discovery in 1903 with the book 鐵雲藏龜 (tie3 yun2 cang2 gui). Those characters found on the bones are called 甲骨文(jia3 gu3 wen2), Oracle bone script.

  (from Wikipedia)

For years (from 500 A.D.) farmers had dug out from a big mound in 小屯(xiao3 tun2), 河南(he2 nan2) “dragon’s bones” to sell to the pharmacies in town. Nobody had paid much attention to the script on them.

After a large-scale of digging, around 170 thousand bones have been found and some 5000 of them are with script on them. About 4500 characters have been labeled as甲骨文, one third of which were recognized and confirmed the meanings.

The bones, whatever beasts or turtles they’re from, are called 甲骨. The Shang Emperors believed that their ancestors’ souls were around the gods in heaven. Whenever they wanted to communicate with them, they use the bones to divine. They asked about wars, crops, dreams, the weather, . . . or presented their wishes to the ancestors by doing the ritual.

First they polished a bone from the cattle or a shell from the turtle, and carved concaved lines on it. They asked their questions loudly to the ancestors and put a burning hot branch into the concaved lines. The high temperature would crackle the shell making a sizzling sound, which was considered the “talk” of the bone.

Answers to the questions were found from the crackles the heat had made. The questions and answers were often inscribed on the bones or shells and stored.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Note ¹ : The following description on 甲骨文is based on the book Tecknens Rike (China: Empire of Living Symbols) “漢字的故事” by Cecilia Lindqvist.

劉鶚=刘鹗

龍骨=龙骨

中邪 (II) (Mystery)

I wouldn’t have believed this had I not seen it happen. I’ve seen the dramatic changes Mary went through in a few hours. She’s back to work. She went to the doctor again a week later for a “double check.” The doctor announced that she’s recovered. (It actually doesn’t take a doctor to tell this.) It takes some people a couple of months to recover, according to the doctor. (And he charged her NT$ 600, around US$ 20 for doing the job.)

After she first went to the doctor, Mary told me another incident which might account for her中邪. Prior to her “heart attack,” she spent the weekend at the seaside in southern Taiwan. At dusk as she was standing near the water, she suddenly felt a gust of chill hitting upon her. She was so cold that she put on a jacket though the others were wearing short-sleeves. And usually she’s the type that is afraid of heat.

Then someone took a photo of her standing alone by the water. When they saw the picture, they were so scared that they deleted it immediately. There was a mass of blurry stuff that looked like a mixture of various ambiguous dark colors above her head.

The next Wednesday, she started to have a fever, which was taken as a cold. That Friday night, she got the “attack” and was sent to the hospital. She even went to a temple to pick out a space for her bone ash jar after this experience. (And half-jokingly she designated one of her designer handbags to be mine after she’s gone.)

Looking up the word 邪(xie2) in the dictionary, you’ll get several explanations. Basically it’s used to refer to evil. For example, Adolf Hitler is widely regarded as an evil person. We may use 邪惡(xie2 e4) to describe him. A notion of hurting someone in return for what he has done may be called 邪念(xie2 nian4), a evil notion.

But in traditional Chinese medicine, 邪 is also used to refer to the environmental factors that lead to a disease, such as 寒邪(han2 xie2), the chill, or 風邪(feng xie2) the wind, that causes a cold. Therefore, to cure a patient means to get rid of the邪. As I know, in the Japanese language, the term風邪means a cold.

No matter what the邪is that attacked Mary, I’m glad that she’s recovered. She might get a new perspective to see her life after this near-death experience. As for me, though she keeps calling me her貴人(gui4 ren2) , which means someone that has done you a big favor or even save your life, I think it’s only her fate. Countless things that happened long before I met her have led to what’s happening today. I’m just a tiny chess that has done what I think I should do. Nothing is in my hand.

It’s good, though, to be someone else’s 貴人 at a certain moment of his life, for we certainly need a lot of 貴人in our own life.

(THE END)

邪惡=邪恶

風邪=风邪

貴人=贵人

中邪 (I) (Mystery)

Last week I wrote about my friend Mary’s “heart attack” in the article前世有修. She took a week’s leave at her doctor’s request. She took all the physical checkups doctors asked her to, but couldn’t figure out what her problem was. One of the doctors diagnosed her as Ischemic Heart Disease. She took medicine but still felt very weak and sick. But it had a dramatic twist after she saw a doctor I recommended to her.

It is a Chinese herbal doctor who uses 氣功(qi4 gong), Qi gong, to cure patients. I recommended him because he successfully cured a friend of mine of his Facial palsy and I’ve watched how he works. He doesn’t need you to tell him your symptoms, but diagnoses without touching you. He stands about 4, 5 meters away from you and moves his hands and fingers a bit like playing a harp. That’s how he diagnoses you.

He cures patients with Chinese herbal medicine. To see him, you got to make an appointment one week before by phone. And if you do not start to call the clinic the moment it starts to take the reservations, in ten minutes it’s full. You got to wait another day.

I think since Mary’s illness was caused by a blood’s “congestion,” it might be good to try Qi gong. Luckily, she managed to see the doctor several days earlier than her appointment because someone had cancelled his appointment. She asked the clinic because she felt very ill.

I talked to her on the phone a couple of hours before she went to the doctor. I called her because I dreamed of her the night before and wanted to check about her. She sounded very sick and weak though she tried to pull herself together and act like she was optimistic.

A few hours later when I called her to ask what the doctor had said, she sounded very different from hours ago. She regained her energy and was back to the normal her. “The doctor said,” in a mysterious tone she said on the phone, “it was not a stroke, but中邪(zhong4 xie2).”

Such a term will not be used by any medical doctors. But some people believe that if you are taken, or “possessed” by some spirit, ghost, (or an unknown power?), it is called中邪. You may change into someone very different, acting in a weird or lunatic way, or become plagued by unknown disease or symptoms like Mary did. Sometimes we will jokingly call someone中邪 for his unusual behavior.

Sometimes people even turn into someone else, speaking a totally different language or acting as another person. We’ll call this 附身(fu4 shen), possessed by someone else’s spirit. In some Taoism temples, some 乩童(ji tong2), Jitong or Tongji, spirit medium, will play the role of a certain deity when he is taken by him to answer the followers’ questions.

The doctor told Mary that the evil power was very strong and stayed in her right arm. He asked her to stand with her arms open and tried to “chase out” the power for her from around 5 meters away. According to Mary, it took him about five to ten minutes to do the job. After that, he told Mary that the power had been gone from her limbs. And she did feel much better.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

氣功=气功