Lessons from The Art of BaZi

by | Dec 8, 2011 | Learning BaZi | 9 comments

Every time I teach ‘The Art of BaZi’, I get insights into why people who learn BaZi face difficulty and challenges getting beyond the basics into the realm of interpretation. I like to understand why people have difficulty learning certain aspects of BaZi because it informs the process of teaching but also serves to indicate in what way the subject can be made easier to understand. As it stands currently, the areas that trip up students remain consistently similar and familiar and so I thought I’d highlight them in this post by way of enabling new and existing students of BaZi to understand where they may potentially become intellectually imperiled by the subject.

The primary and most fundamental reason why beginners have difficulty progressing to the intermediate level of BaZi (which involves a measure of interpretation/analysis but not a detailed level) is simply a lack of respect for the subject. Often there is no lack of interest but for some reason, there seems to be this notion that it is either absurdly easy or absurdly difficult. It is neither of these extremes. It is like ANY OTHER SUBJECT or SKILL – it requires time, effort, practice and focus in order for any outcomes to be obtained.

This lack of respect for the subject often manifests in one very common feature and that is the absence of the Fundamental Basics. What are the fundamental basics? Essentially, it is learning to read the 22 characters that form the 10 Stems and the 12 Branches. Now, I often hear the clarion call ‘But I am not Chinese Educated’. 

So what?

It often comes as a shock to many people that I am also not Chinese educated. Chinese education affords zero advantage in the study of metaphysics or for that matter, BaZi specifically. Sure, it helps a little by way of making it easier to LEARN how to write the characters but writing is less important than RECOGNITION of the character and also knowing WHAT IT REPRESENTS. You may write the ugliest Mao 卯 character on this planet (mine looks ugly as any student who has seen me write it in class will attest) but as long as you know Mao = Rabbit = Earthly Branch of the Season of Spring = 3-5am = month of March .

Well, who cares if it looks like a worm on the page when you write it?

Some students argue that they should be allowed to the leeway to read the characters in Pinyin script or in the English equivalents. I don’t see any reason why this is the case. If one is serious about learning and mastering BaZi, then learning 22 characters is not a great effort. You could do it in 22 days theoretically, assuming you write one character 100 times per day.

So up there in the top 2 reasons why students struggle with learning how to interpret BaZi is a very elementary one: they simply haven’t mastered the recognition of the characters. This is like trying to read Le Monde without knowing a single word of French.

The second of the top 2 reasons why students struggle with learning how to interpret BaZi is that IF they can recognise the characters, they don’t know how the characters inter-relate with each other.

Taking the example above again of Mao – knowing the inter-relationship between the characters means knowing that Mao =  Peach Blossom Star = part of 亥 卯 未 = part of 寅 卯 辰 = Combines with 戌 Dog = Clash with 酉Rooster = Harm with 辰 Dragon = Punishment with  Rat 子 =  Destruction with Horse 午.

So whenever a chart is being discussed, the students get lost because they can’t follow the discussion of what is going on. They don’t know or see what is going on in the chart and so get lost half way through the discussion. 

This of course is easily rectified – I tell my students to simply take a RED PEN and spend at least 5 minutes circling all the relevant interactions WITHIN the chart (those who have seen my Youtube video will also note that was done – FOR A REASON!).

So, assuming a student recognises the characters and knows the interactions, why is there still an inability to interpret at the intermediate level? (if you are an MA student, completing Module 2 would be regarded as Intermediate). This is where most people get tripped up: the 10 Gods.

Again, with the 10 Gods, it’s all about the simple basics. What each 10 God means by way of THE ELEMENT (10 stems)  that represents each 10 God, CHARACTER TRAITS, by way of RELATIONSHIP and by way of OBJECT OR SUBJECT is often not in the immediate radar for most students. (note for Module 2 students of MA, character traits is heavily covered as part of the syllabus, as are relationships – Object or Subject less so granted by now well covered in JY’s 10 Gods book and two Power of X books). 

So it is not uncommon for a student to not be able to identify the 10 God that co-relates to each of the 10 Stems in a given BaZi chart. ie: if given the chart of a Wu Earth Day Master, they would NOT be able to work out on the fly what Jia Wood and Yi Wood for example, co-relate to by way of the 10 Gods (Answer: 7 Killings and Direct Officer). Seeing as there is already a struggle at the ELEMENT level, it is no surprise that the CHARACTER TRAIT, RELATIONSHIP, OBJECT OR SUBJECT aspect also becomes a struggle. The sole exception of this of course is the Direct Wealth/Indirect Wealth Stars, which invariably everyone knows but yet knows at skin deep level.

Other common errors of students when it comes to the 10 Gods:

  • Selective memory/learning – since most people learn to interpret for themselves, they invariably only know the 10 Gods as it relates to THEMSELVES and their own Day Master. So when confronted with a chart that doesn’t involve the same DM as themselves, they’re clueless. [Lesson: if you want to really learn BaZi, even if it is for yourself ONLY, learn the 10 gods for all the 10 Day Masters]
  • Minimal knowledge of character traits that each of the 10 Gods represent. 
  • Minimal knowledge of which RELATIONSHIPS each of the 10 Gods represent. This in my view is really no excuse since this at its most basic level is super straightforward: Wealth = Spouse (for men), Father (for both genders), Resource = Mother (for both genders), Output = Children (for women), Influence = Spouse (for women), Children for men, Rob Wealth/Friend = Partners or Siblings
Now assuming a student DOES have all these basics down to pat, what then is the reason for the difficulty with interpretation?

Again, 9 times out of 10, it’s about forgetting the important principles and getting all panicked by the chart. My favourite point to make to students is that there is no such thing as EVERYTHING in a BaZi chart. One student sheepishly confessed to the question ‘What do you want to know’ with the reply ‘Everything’. Now, Everything IS in the chart, but Everything does not exist as an answer. You need to break things down into discrete smaller chunks and specific questions. This often is where the confusion starts to reign because students try to look at the entire chart when they need to look at SPECIFIC FEATURES in the chart. The problem is making the connections or joining the dots as it were. On some levels, it is very logical. Most students GET THIS when they are examining the subject matter of Wealth for example (because who the hell is NOT curious about money) but the problem is, they don’t know how to QUALIFY what they have found (which of course, involves a little more advanced knowledge). They don’t know how to connect the dots between CHARACTER and OUTCOMES. 
This is where of course the subject becomes difficult and more demanding.

 

At a more advanced level of BaZi, there is a demand for an intrinsic understanding of the human condition. Most people do not observe human nature – they simply go about their business in life, oblivious to observations of people. Mastering BaZi at some point requires an understanding of the human being by way of how CHARACTER = ACTION = REACTION = ACTION. Things do not happen for no reason and in 99% of the time, CHARACTER is the reason for one thing or another happening. And to understand and posit an outcome from a given situation (forecasting by any other name) one must understand the fundamentals of character and what happens when Character Trait A appears together with Character Trait B or when Character Trait C dominates a person’s thinking/action or when Character Trait D is missing from a person’s personality. Putting all this information together and then combining it with contextual information and background (meaning, the specific environment – work, culture, upbringing – that surrounds the person) is what enables a complete picture to emerge from the chart. 
And a great deal of all this is ultimately fine-tuned through the most fundamental basic of all: an understanding of the traits and qualities of the Day Master, which is almost always IGNORED by students in the name of the Clashes, Combos and disastardly Punishments and Harms, as well as Death and Emptiness that lurks about the chart.