Chinese fortune telling
There are many methods still in practice in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other Chinese-speaking regions such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore today.
Two well known methods of divination included bǔ 卜 (on the tortoise shells) and shì 筮 (on the stalks of milfoil shī 蓍).
A number of divination techniques developed around the astronomic observations and burial practices (see Feng shui, Guan Lu).
The dynastic chronicles preserve a number of reports when divination was manipulated to the end of achieving a political or personal goal.
[1] This article is going to mainly explore the occupation of fortune-tellers in Ming, including their professional skills, contact with clients, and social impact.
[2] Other fortune tellers in the country areas would also set up booths at places with a high population density, such as the city entrance and temples.
[8] The other method a physiognomer would use was to compare the facial structure of the client to animals, which possessed distinctive symbolism and meanings.
Besides focusing on the structure and details of the face, another crucial technique for fortune tellers was to look at one's facial color to determine the potential success or failure a person might achieve.
Based upon this fact, even though the way physiognomers judged a person's facial color was different from a doctor, he would still need to possess some basic medical knowledge to establish the ground for this calculation.
[16] For instance, a physiognomer would consider the client as a “water” person if “he had a round, heavy, and blackish appearance, with large eyes, thick eyebrows, hanging stomach, and erect shoulders.”[17] To read his client more deeply, he needed to go beyond the single quality of a specific element and to understand the complex relationship within the network of all five elements, and their various forms of manifestation in one's body.
[24] Through combining the stem-branches of one's birth and their five elements, fortune tellers calculated the client's fate through finding the mutual relationship between these two.
Their social role allows decision risks to be placed outside of the organization and provides a mechanism of quickly randomly deciding between several equally useful options.
[37] Some blind people, disqualified from other occupations, would wander on the streets and practice physiognomy, particular the method of touching clients’ bones and listening to their voices.
For instance, fortune tellers who were identified in the records were usually educated men from higher social classes, and some of them were even scholar-officials who played significant roles in government.
[36] For instance, the Yuan family from the Ming Dynasty, who was the major contributor to the book of Shenxiang Quanbian, was also well-educated and participated in the central government.
[37] Fortune tellers who built up a solid reputation could gain favors from the emperors and obtain upward social mobility.
[29] Specifically, a geomancer needed to check if the location had “less wind but more water” so that the deceased would be able to peacefully live in another world and to bless the family.
For instance, in Ling Mengzhu's story, the main character, Wen Ruoxu, paid one coin for the fortune teller's service.
Yuan Gong, a fortune teller who was specialized in physiognomy, successfully predicted that Zhu Di would be the emperor of Ming and persuaded him to try to take over the throne.
During the reign of the Wanli Emperor, some greedy officials tried to exploit more mines in order to earn more profit, but this affected civilians’ living and caused chaos.
On this account, a geomancer named Wu Peng stopped them from mining by telling them they would be unfortunate because they broke the balance of “Feng Shui”.
[50] What's more, historical records show that one reason that Chengzu usurped the throne from his nephew was that a physiognomer named Yuan Gong predicted that he would become the emperor.
Unfortunately, due to the popularity of divination in China, the Jesuits needed to do the calculation very often, and they did not fully understand this culture.
One sardonic example was that the Jesuits, as specialists in astrology, were impeached by a Chinese scholar because of an inappropriate date they chose for a prince's funeral.
[52] Among many fortune telling methods, one of them, Tianshi Dao Order ("天师道") explicitly limited its usage at their early period.
Simplified Chinese:一命二运三风水四积阴德五读书 六名七相八敬神九交贵人十养生[59] Pinyin: yī mìng èr yùn sān fēngshuǐ sì jī yīndé wǔ dúshū, liù míng qī xiāng bā jìngshén jiǔ jiāo guìrén shí yǎngshēng.
The above quote, relating to the "five components" of the good or ill fortune of any given individual, is culturally believed to have come from Su Shi of the Song dynasty.
It refers to an ancient battle between the powers of good and evil, one of the founding schools of thought of the Chinese formation myth.
Whilst not frequently used since ethnic tensions in the cultural revolution of 1966, it still has great meaning to a small minority in rural regions of Jiangxi.
