Wild Crane Series: ZSBY-2. Ch.3

[duesouth]

Please find attached my pdf-ed translation of Zengshan Buyi?s Chapter 3:
?   [Chapter 3] Eight Palaces? 64 Gu? Names 八宮六十四卦名

Hexagram and trigram names and identifiers
I adopted the hexagram (gu?) and trigram names used by Joey Yap, except I use ?Lake? instead of ?Marsh?.

To assist readers in their search of hexagrams, I inserted hexagram identifiers taking the form of (letter)/(letter) to denote the upper trigram over the lower trigram e.g. X/L = Wind over Lake (see ZSBY-0 pdf on terminology).

The letters are:
[E] ☷ Kun 坤 as Earth 地
[F] ☲ Lu 離 as Fire 火
[H] ☰ Qian 乾 as Heaven 天
[L] ☱ Dui 兑 as Lake 澤
[M] ☶ Gen 艮 as Mountain 山
[T] ☳ Zhen 震 as Thunder 雷
[W] ☵ Kan 坎 as Water 水
[X] ☴ Xun 巽 as Wind 風

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[Random88]

Divining about guarding against anxieties. If obtain Son-Daughter holding Subject, need
not worry. [If] Officer-Ghost holds Subject, doubts are difficult to resolve.

Basically if the Self line is Offspring/Child - nothing much going on, so one doesn't need to worry. If its Officer, then one is clearly worried.

Is this true... In my humble view, its not. If one Self line is Offspring/Child and Officer is clashing him from the Month, the idea there is no need to worry is not very suited to the actual situation.

As far as I'm aware the Self line is our current state in time of asking, the fact one is not worried when asking, doesn't mean he won't be as soon as the situation progresses.

Here we can say that if that change is suppose to happen the Self line should move and change to Officer or something... But if we have very weak Offspring/Child line being clashed with extremly strong Officer or even Parent line, this would provide overall Image of problems/worries etc. even if the Self doesn't change its relation to the situation.

[ren]

Hey Random88,

From what I have read of this section, it sounds like a simplified way of using the Liu Yao setting, with the Self line.
It goes through ?Four Matter? scenarios and uses Offspring, Wealth, Officer, Sibling, or Six Clash to determine auspicious or inauspiciousness.
It does not use the five element interactions, combos, clashes etc. No change lines.
If I am reading this correctly; as described in this method, if either Officer or Offspring, Wealth or Sibling are not on the subject one can divine again (cast a new hexagram).

Interesting stuff.

Ren

[Random88]

Yea, but I don't think the system will adhere to it. If a problem comes from outside, will override the idea we can just look at the relation on the Self line.
Because I used something very similar, only it was strength related, but still wasn't looking much at other stuff and only at Self line... And while in general it works somewhat, its not very reliable, as if there is a lot of the opposite that is going on, one isn't suppose to just ignore it.

So overall, I get the idea, it can be very useful if it worked, but I don't think it will work reliably.

[duesouth]

Hi,

Agree that ?If obtain Son-Daughter holding Subject, need not worry.? is just part of the ?simple and easy method? and not the full method.

From section 3.6, we get the qualifier:
?Moreover, I wrote this part?s simple and easy method, only desiring to teach all those who not know about Five Elements to learn how to divine a gu?. Just follow the Complete Diagram, to label and arrange. Soon will know how to interpret the four major matters. Suppose you know Five Elements principles, you should not use this method. Be sure to carefully read this book?s later volumes.?

I do find it a bit annoying that some parts of ZSBY adopt a proposition-negation argument structure. ZSBY first states a proposition and later negates it, either partially by qualifying it or wholly by refuting it. A person reading the proposition (e.g. ?ancient method says??) might mistake it to be a principle, only for ZSBY to refute it a few sentences or paragraphs later. In this case, the ?simple and easy method? is a proposition which the rest (~95%) of the book 'negates'!

Cheers.

[Random88]

I agree, that is my problem as well. Mostly because at any given time the person practicing will never know how much of what he is using would have been negated later in the system if the teacher knew enough.
Only thing we know is the practitioner will have holes in their method all through the time they are using the system, suggesting at any point on important question the system may fail them...

So its creating a construct that by definition is unstable when done this way. It seems to have resulted in a lot of people thinking WWG is unreliable... Yet that isn't because that is inherit in the system, its because the people that wrote about it(some of them , anyway) wrote in a way where a false methods were given, then much later on parts of them negated... And that continue each step of the way.

How much he never had enough experience to negate and was left in there as a potential trap for the practitioner... All that someday will backfire usually in a small way, leading to people losing faith in the system, but in some cases may actually be in big enough way...

That is one of the  main reasons I really dislike Wild Cranes material. Practicing by this, one takes a compromise, they will adopt not fully working rules, hoping sometime in the future they will "repair" them... If that happens, great, but when there are a lot of those piled on top of each other, at some point its debatable how easy it would be to fix the system, even if fully working system is given. Then they have layers and layers of techniques with holes in them, as that was how they were presented originally...

So better ignore the material, learning by it is just a way of adopting weakness in the approach then piling more on top of that until they become impossible to find later on... And al that could be a real problem later on...