Eight character divination

More than 3,000 years ago, when oracle bones and tortoise shells were being used by the Chinese kings to divine the future, a calender system was already in operation which consisted of sixty days per cycle. Each of the sixty days was named based on the combination of two sets of characters -- the ten Heavenly Stems and the twelve Earthly Branches. (The names sound fairytale-like, but it is really nothing more than two sets of symbols, just like our abc and 123.) Many inscriptions on the oracle bones included the Stem-Branch combination of that day.

Later, the sixty-day cycle fell into disuse, but these two sets of symbols were retained and applied to years, months and days -- a combination of two for each -- which were then interpreted by fortune-tellers. In the Sung dynasty (xxx-xxx AD), the hour of birth was included in the calculation, adding one more pair of characters -- making four pairs in all. These four pairs are often called the "Four Pillars" of destiny, or simply the "Eight characters". Everyone has a series of eight characters based on the year, month, day and hour of their birth, and these characters are used by fortune-tellers to work out a person's fortune. Encyclopaedic works were written, particularly in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644 AD) and the Manchu dynasty which followed it, explaining the significance of all possible combinations of the eight characters.

According to the "Fate Calculation" fortune-telling, the Eight Characters provide only a rough guide, to a person's life: the actual details are also influenced by luck and by the efforts of the individudal. As the saying goes, "It is better to have good luck than a good fortune".

Some Chinese parents today take advantage of modern science to make sure their children have a good set of "Eight Characters". They request that the doctor perform a casearian section and bring the child into the world on an auspicious day and at an auspicious time as chosen by a fortune-teller beforehand. This they hope, will bring the child good fortune and happiness throughout its life. But there are problems. Firstly, according to the Eight Character method of fortune-telling, a person's fate is influenced by all eight characters -- that is by the year, month, day and time of his or her birth, not just by the four characters for the day and time. Another problem is that a particular set of Eight Characters is supposed to have a completely different effect depending on whether the child is male or female, which makes an caesarian birth very dangerous, from the point of view of divination, unless the parents are absolutely sure of the sex of the unborn child.

In old China, such attempts to "manufacturer" a favourable set of Eight Characters were naturally out of the question. Soon after a child's birth, a fortune-teller would be invited to work out the Eight Character set and determine whether it was auspicious or not. If it was NOT ausoicious, the child could expect to be ignored in later life not only by Lady Luck, but also by prospective marriage partners. Before a marriage the Eight Characters of each partner were examined to see if they were well-matched. If they were not, marriage could be out of the question. In such cases, according to one Taiwan author, the fortune-teller would be asked to fake the Eight Characters, altering the time of birth to provide a more auspicious combination. In theory, people with the same set of eight characters -- that is, born at the same time -- should have identical fates. the experts explain the inevitable differences by saying that there are other factors involved in how a person's life works out, including place of birth, parentage and education. Conversely, what of a situation such as the nuclear bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War? Did all the people who died in that bomb attack have a similar set of Eight Characters? One expert in Taiwan, Chung Chin-tien, explains this apparent discrepancy by saying that on certain occasions there are what he describes as "mass attacks of ill-fortune" (Da Jie Shu). To escape with your life in such a situation requires a particularly auspicious set of Eight Characters.

Can someone born with a bad set of Eight Characters do anything to improve the situation? Yes, says Chung: the way in which a person behaves, be it good or evil, can affect his fate.

It is a repetition of the theories of Early Heavan and Late Heaven (see I Ching section) -- Early Heaven and the Eight Characters represent a person's fate as set down at birth, while Late Heaven gives a clue as to how things will pan out when all the other factors of life are taken into account.

HOW THE EIGHT-CHARACTER SYSTEM WORKS - The traditional Chinese moves in sixty-year cycles, and each year in the cycle is represented by a different two-character combination from the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches. The two-character combination for the year of your birth is the first of the four combinations which goes to make up your own personal Eight Characters. When the Eight Characters are analysed, they are related to the Five Elements and then their various strengths and weaknesses considered.

As to the characters which go to make the Eight Character sequence which represents the time of a person's birth, half are associated with Yin (dark, female, negative), and half with Yang (bright, male, positive). What would be the fate of someone who had a straight run of Yin-type characters? According to one book, such a person is extremely evil and unfilial into the bargain. Someone with a full set of Yang characters, on the other hand, seems nasty but is really kind-hearted. People who have a preponderance of Yin characters are believed by some to be particularly susceptible to seeing and being possessed by ghosts and spirits.

There is another way of interpreting the Eight Characters, sometime used in connection with the more usual methods -- a weight value is assigned to each of the characters, the amounts added up and the total interpreted as an indication of how rich or poor, lucky and unlucky, clever or stupid the person is going to be. People whose Eight Characters "weigh" less than four and a half taels (about 250 grams) will do badly, while those who top that total will be okay.

But for all its detail and antiquity, the Eight Character fortune-telling method is acknowledged even by the experst to be accurate only up to a point. Seventy per cent accuracy is considered to be excellent success rate.

The inaccuracies, say the experts are result of a number of factors, the most common being inaccuracies in the information regarding the time of birth of the person whose fortune is being told. Furthermore, the experts say, the Eight Character Method is still in the process of development. Diviners agree, for instance, that apart from the time of birth as represented by the Eight Characters, the place of birth is also a crucial influence on a person's fate. But there is no agreement yet on how to take this element of "place" into account in the calculations.

Wong Yuk-lin is a 67-year-old blind woman who has been setting up her fortune-telling stall -- a little table with a stool on either side, one for her and one for the client -- outside a pawnshop on Hongkong island almost every day for more than twenty years. She is one of Hongkong's better-known fortune- tellers, and offers a general overview of your life's fortune for forty Hongkong dollars, or a specific reading of your fortune for the next year for twelve dollars. I went for the forty dollar overview.

She uses the basic Eight Character method of fortune- telling, but links it in with the I Ching coin method of divination as well. First of all she works out your own "eight characters" in her head, talking to herself as she does it. It was an extraordinary and impressive sight watching this old, blind woman working out an eight-character sequence linked to a sixty year cycle of the lunar calender from a Western calender birth date (being blind, she cannot refer to the almanac conversion tables used by fortune-tellers with sight).

She then picked up a small, worn tortoise shell and withdrew from its interior three very old and worn Chinese copper coins. She gave the tortoise carapace three sharp knocks with the coins, then chanted a rhyme, then placed them inside the shell, shook them about and spilled them onto a plastic plate. She felt each coin to check if it had fallen heads or tails and repeated the process several times. (See I Ching how-to section for details) After some more talking to herself as she worked out how the ansswer given by the coins relatred to my eight characters, she announced my fortune:

My eight characters include two fire elements, which for me is extremely good. The best years of my life will be 44 to 59. From 59 to 62, I must be careful, and should not take any chances. But if my annual short-term luck is good in each of those years, then I'll be all right. From 62 to 65 will be trouble-free. From 65 to 69, I will have some illness, but if I can pass 69 years of age, I will live to an extremely old age.