Question:
If I replace Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, with Sour, Bitter, Sweet, Pungent and Salty; in short, the Five Elements with Five Tastes instead.
Would you still need to change the Seasons to match?
I don't think the tastes fit very well. The colors of the foods either. White foods are metal, in theory, great, but when we have so many exceptions, because of taste or other factors, then it isn't a rule, its just trying to use a system on a framework that doesn't really fit into it.
So no, at their practical use doesn't seem to fit very well to reality and it seems just approximation, so a familiar division can be used somewhere else, it wouldn't be needed. Just my view, of course and I don't know a lot about the practical aspect of the five elements in food.
However, the light from the Sun seems to be playing some role in all this.
I get the idea of using what is presented, but outside of QMDJ and most of Yi Jing I don't think what is presented should be taken right away. We already make calculation, make stems/branches etc. so it already isn't taken right away, we now are clearing out how much steps are needed to arrive at what is presented, but no one takes it as it is.
Members in the old forum that seem to have connection to the blind schools were strongly supporting the idea hour pillar shouldn't be adjusted.
I guess the idea was BaZi chart was taken like we take a Hexagram for example. We use what comes to us.
That was one thing that bothered me for a while, as if they are doing it there had to be more behind it. However, with time and rereading the examples some other explanation started to become more likely.
If we look into the examples they read, it seems there was always a carefulness when it came to the hour. Often the assumption the hour may be wrong and trying to find the more suitable one...
Now, if we just take whatever is given, there shouldn't ever be finding more suitable hour, as the one presented should always be correct. If we look for more suitable one or assume it may not be correct means we already think underneath it all that there is more correct hour, we just don't want to start with that idea right away.
While if adjusting the solar time is correct, then people working without adjusting it, but can read the charts well, will be very careful when working with the hour and it will show up exactly in this way. They are skipping a step in the system and trying to compensate for it, but the step is as important as all the others, just difficult to calculate without a lot of math.
Again would make sense to be skipped by blind practitioners, as calculating True Solar Time without software is more challenging. So rules like this are logical to come up.
Same counts for WWG, that would make rules like "don't read hexagrams around midnight" etc. The reason would be that they aren't adjusting, but they are clearly seeing around midnight(where the solar time adjustment would count for WWG), something won't be right.
So basically both groups, the people that don't agree with Solar Time,but can read charts well and the people that do, seems to be adjusting it, just in different ways. As I said in my view month adjustment is same as Solar Time one, its just for month branches instead of the hour. And is less popular as so much fewer people are in the other hemisphere then they are in other timezones.
And even if we forget all that, we can just think of what the Solar Terms are suppose to represent.
Imagine in Solar Term:
22.Winter solstice 冬至 or "Winter begins" as it is sometimes translated.
How much sense it makes to be in "Winter begins" and "Winter Solstice" Solar Term, when all around you its Summer Solstice and the start of Summer as it is in the other hemisphere...
So even if we use what is presented, what is presented is the beginning of Winter even in the Solar Term names and its starting place for its longitude/place of the Sun as well. If we are somewhere where the Summer just started, it should make some sense to think is this what is actually presented or the system need another layer of movement to be fully ready for use.