FAQ: Pillars of Destiny

Pillars of Destiny is also known as Eight Characters of Birth (Ba Zi) & Four Pillars (Si Zhu).

What is Pillars of Destiny?

It is an accurate fortune telling tool which is able to predict whether you are born with a fortunately life (living comfortably) or a poor and hard life. It uses your Date of Birth and Hour of Birth to generate a 8 characters using 4 heavenly stem (tian zhu) and 4 earthly branches (di zhu). With the 8 different characters many different readings can be performed to check for wealth, marriage etc.

Why is Pillars of Destiny (Ba Zi) important in Feng Shui?

1. True Personal Ba Zi Element

Everything in Feng Shui is about Yin & Yang or a more detailed breakdown into the Five Element concept.

• Colour (i.e. Blue/Black/Gray - Water element)
• Shapes (i.e. Round/Circle - Metal element)
• Career (i.e. IT related - Metal/Water element)
• Relationship (i.e. weak Water and Strong Metal - very compatible)
• Material (i.e. wood furniture, metal furniture)

So knowing your Ba Zi, is like unlocking one part of a personal analysis in the entire Feng Shui Analysis.

2. Luck Period

Knowing how you luck flows from time-to-time allows you to better take advantage of your auspicious periods and take extra caution during inauspicious periods.

In Feng Shui, sometimes when you are encountering a bad period (ie health problems, career problems) part of the Feng Shui problems could be because you are in a very bad period in your Luck Period. This usually together with other Feng Shui areas (like your Home Feng Shui, Shapes and Form etc) will usually be the cause of the problems. So knowing it can help you know where and how you can improve it.

3. Fortune Telling

One aspect of Ba Zi is that there is a Fortune Telling aspect of it. However, frankly our experences tells us that there are other better fortune telling like the Palm Reading, Face Reading Bone Reading etc which gives a more accurate Fortune Telling aspect than Ba Zi which only looks on your Date & Time of Birth. And thus Ba Zi gives you only your Heavenly Luck. However, Your Palm, Your Face can you a lot more as it relates very closely with your body development.

So in our analysis, we DO NOT focus on such issues. It focuses on Feng Shui area of the Ba Zi and thus it is often called Ba Zi Feng Shui. Where it personalises a person to the environment. This is the integral part of why our Feng Shui Audit MUST have a Ba Zi done for each client so that we can personalised the environment to that person.Purchase our Life Reading Ba Zi Service

What is the difference between our element analysis vs Luck Pillars?

Basically, the 4 pillars of destiny report contains TWO PARTS:-

Part One as an analysis of a person's Year, Month, Day and Time of birth.

In ancient China and even today, whenever a child is born,  a parent would consult on their child's 8 characters derived from the 4 pillars i.e. his Year, Month, Day and Time.

This is to ultimately derive as accurately a person's exact element and compare this in relation to the `season' he is born.

The  first purpose of the report is to determine if a person is lacking any elements. For instance, when my brother was  born his 8 characters was not balanced and he lacked water.

In this situation, what was necessary was to include a water  element in his name. If you follow this, it means that you have 4 yin and 4 yang and in such a situation, your OVERALL  pillars are balanced. Based on such practices, you do not lack any elements.

I  give you another example, when i was born, my grandfather consulted and found that like you , I have 4 yin and 4 yang.  and thus I am also considered balanced. I was thus given  a name with `Tiong' or in hokkien means `centre'.

In addition to this, there are more uses to your element. For example if you are a person with weak wood in the FIRST  PART OF THE ANALYSIS (I am still at the first part and not  on the Luck Pillars)

As in the above example, we know that a person has weak wood, and if say he buys a house. Each house will have a central  element. If say the house element is wood, then it means  that the house is auspicious to him. Therefore, Feng Shui Masters also use the element derived from a person using  the Pillars of Destiny to COMPARE this with his home.

In normal situations, some Feng Shui practioners merely look  at a person's year of birth for example and then come to the conclusion that since a person is borth in the year  of the Water-Rabbit, his element is Water. However, as mentioned, the 4 pillars analyses all the 8 elements plus their yin  and yang element and come out with the most accurate element  of the person e.g. weak water, neutral water, strong water.

Here,  from the report you then understand that a person is of the Water element and then use the information such as:

1. Best colour : Blue, grey or black for person with Water  element.
2. Design of company logo e.g. wavy shapes.
3. More include, type of rings etc.
I hope you have a rough idea by now what the 4 pillars of  analysis is about and why you are analysed as 4 yin and  4 yang as balanced.

How accurate is the software?

After  developing the software, we went to a book store to find  books on Pillars of Destiny. For example, we bought a book by Evelyn Lip called Personalise your Feng Shui, Publisher  Times Books International and tried a few sample  reports and found that in Page 32 of the above book, her book stated Age 48 to 57 as yin WATER ELEMENT and  Age 58 to 67 as mao WATER ELEMENT which were wrongly printed  maybe due to a typo error. Both the two elements should  instead be WOOD.

An extract of a traditional Feng Shui assessment done by
a Feng Shui Master in 1932:-

However, the results that our software program calculated and analysed  for him provided accurate preditions of his past events especially his luck pillars. " Jokingly he said that  was why the report was never accurate! How he wished there was such a program then. "

We also used the program to analyse each of our family's Luck Pillar and found that indeed it matched our past events. Wow!

The  above reasons shows that on instances, for one reason or  another there could be errors made by human beings. As for  the program, we took the extra effort to go through the  source code line by line and countless hours were spent by several friends to separately verify the information. We also did extensive test calculations. The reason is because  for the Pillars of Destiny COMPUTATION  MUST BE DONE CORRECTLY. If the computation and analysis (especiallythe computation) was not done correctly, the  basis of the analyses undertaken will be flawed as shown by above two examples-.

Furthermore, some Feng Shui practioners only analyse the DAY Pillar and HOUR Pillar or the YEAR Pillar only. Some analyse all three pillars in relation to the stem of the DAY pillar or due to human nature forgot to compare certain pillars. The software  was designed to compare all EIGHT CHARACTERS in relation to the main DAY stem making it the most powerful program available.

How  often do I need to generate a Pillars of Destiny Report?

For  everyone of us, we only need to generate one report for LIFE!

The  EIGHT CHARACTERS alone is the most important fundamental  report as it forms the basis to interpret a person's entire life. In addition to this, the LUCK PILLARS is another report that comes with this. Don't be deceived by the COMPACTNESS of the whole report. Ask any Feng Shui practioner skilled in Pillars of Destiny and they can't give you more than  what is shown for both the Eight Characters and Luck Pillars.

Q. I'm puzzled as I've always thought & been told I am a  Water Rabbit, based on my YEAR Pillar. Can you explain? Also, I have lots of wood furniture, except my metal bed, plus some bronze figurines, some pottery and lots of books and mags. Would this be bad for my EARTH?

A. The best way to understand this is to quote Dr. Evelyn Lip's Book Personalise Your Feng Shui, Times Books International,  on Page 22, She wrote:-

"Some  geomancers treat the element of the essence of the binominal  as the principal factor assessing a person's horoscope. Others analyse only the and hour of birth, or only the year.  However, the traditional and most accurate way is to treat  the stem of the day of birth and the branches of the year, month and hour of birth as the principal factors."

In your full report, the purpose of the Pillars of Destiny  is to look at all Eight elements of a person: TWO elements in his Year of birth, TWO elements in his Month of birth,  TWO elements of his Day of birth and TWO elements in his Time of birth. The elements refered to are Water, Earth, Wood, Metal and Fire. This is to find out if a person has  too much of any one of the elements or too little or a good  balance. The philosophy behind Pillars of Destiny is harmony and balance of all the 5elements.

Therefore, taking only your year pillar and calling yourself a Water  Rabbit is not as accurate as using the Pillars of Destiny to compare all your eight elements combined to find your  true element i.e. NEUTRAL EARTH. Neutral earth simply means that all your elements are in balance and you do not `lack'  any other elements.

For  my case, based on the Pillars of Destiny, I have " NEUTRAL  WOOD " and that was why my grandfather after consulting  a Feng Shui Master gave me part of my name with " Tiong  " in it. This is a Hokkien dialect which means CENTER or  in balance.

What can we learn from this? Pillars of Destiny is one of the first report that we should have to determine our true element and whether it is in balance or out of balance e.g. excessive  Fire. This requires a controlling element such as Water when we plan our house renovations.

Hi, I think program is not that accurate on the month. My birth date is 4 June 1962, time:1.38am but the month characters are wrong. It's not Ping Wu. Kindly check for me.

A. Currently there are two methods used to calculate the Pillars of Destiny:-

Method 1. Purely based on the Chinese Lunar Calendar System.

Method 2. Mixing the Xia Calendar (Month only) with Chinese Lunar New Year Calendar (Day and Year) and the Hour is derived from the Day calculation. Is like comparing an apple with an orange!

I believe what you meant by that is that you did a conversion of the month to the Xia Calender Month which should give you the month as "yi si".

 We have previously considered trying to use Method 2: Mixing the Xia Calendar (Month) with the Chinese Lunar New Year Calendar (Hour, Day and Year). But as you can notice it is like comparing an apple (Xia Month) with oranges (Lunar Hour, Day and Year)! This is flawed!

The problem with Method 2 is that when you do that is that you are using two different calendar dates standard to determine different pillars. Lunar Calender and Xia Calender are different in nature and therefore will provide you with different dates of birth. Under your Lunar Calendar your date of birth is 3 (chu san) 5 (May or wu yue) 1962. If you want to take into consideration Xia Calendar then your date of birth is 30 / 4 / 1962.

If you were to take the way some Hong Kong Feng Shui practioners does their calculation such as taking 3 / 4 / 1962. (Lunar Day / Xia Month / Lunar Year). Do you know how many days the calendar differ? If you take Xia Month, it is 27 days and if you take Lunar Month it is 1 month apart.

You cannot simply take two different calendar dates to perform a calculation for the Pillars of Destiny, if you do so it would result it an inaccurate calculation of the Pillars. If you want to take the Xia Calendar then you will have to Completely take the Xia Calendar calculation. However, the problem with the Xia Calendar is that it is as inaccurate as the Western Calendar in the fact that it uses a fix 30/31 days in the months. Which may at certain year fall short resulting in the existance of a Blind Year. However, the reason why it was used is Under your Lunar Calendar your date of birth is 3 (chu san) 5 (May or wu yue) 1962. If you want to take into consideration Xia Calendar then your date of birth is 30 / 4 / 1962.

We thus decide to stick purely to the Chinese Lunar Calendar System.

Due to this, academic reasoning, the program calculated by us takes solely the use of Lunar Calendar (which is the most accurate defacto Chinese Calendar). This Calendar cannot be determined by normal calculation, which you need to refer to the Thousand Year Calendar book for the correct translation or use the calendar engine developed by Robert Lee of Geomancy-Online.com.

Therefore, you see that under this reasoning, we have decided to stick to the Lunar Calendar results to generate the Pillars of Destiny. What matters at the end of the interpretation is that taking one set of Calendar System would result in the Elements for each Heavenly Stem and Earthly Stem to fall in sync for all the 4 Pillars. This would therefore, provide you with an interpretation that will take into account the harmony of the Balance of your Elements.

Your month pillar is therefore "bing wu" and not "yi si". If you want to take "yi si" then your day and hour and year pillar will have to conform to the Xia Calendar. However, the Heavenly Stem and Animal Sign Symbols for the day, month, year conforms to the Lunar Calendar as such there is no conversion for the Xia Calendar, which is why we do not agree with that way of calculation which utilizes the Month Pillar or Month and Year Pillar to be calculated in Xia Calendar. Therefore Method 2 : using partial Xia and Lunar calendar is a flawed system without an academic basis. It is like comparing an apple with an orange.

What has fortune telling have to do with Feng Shui?

Nothing at all. Fortune Telling is the art of predicting from some details the characteristics of a person, how many children he or she has etc. These has nothing to do with Feng Shui

So why is Pillars of Destiny still so important for Feng Shui

This is because Pillars of Destiny has TWO components. One is the fortune telling aspect (telling you about predictions) and the more important aspect of Personal Heavenly luck.

Feng Shui is has several luck factors, Heavenly Luck, Earthly Luck. The only tool that can provide the Heavenly Luck is the Pillars of Destiny, other tools such as Flying Star.

Everyone is supposed to be born with a specific heavenly luck that cannot be changed in anyway.

Thus, the Pillars of Destiny is to chart the heavenly luck of person, so that this information can be used to help you in Feng Shui analysis.

What does this mean?

This means that in order to relate to Feng Shui, every object (eg a house have to use the flying star theory to determine the various influence, a person have to use the  pillars of destiny theory to determine the various influence.)

Thus, the key factor which we are interested in for the Pillars of Destiny report is the heavenly influence of a person. Which is also the changing luck period of a person during different stages in his life.

So this is why our report DOES NOT focus on Fortune telling aspect but more on the changing influence in your life. And it is due to knowing these changing influence, that you can try to get the best of your life.

So we do not predict such thing as (number of children or age to get married.) Why? Simply because with the advances of Medical Science, even without if the chart predicts that a person will not have children, they can have it from a test tube baby etc. Even for marriage, if a person is determined to get a wife in say age of 30, but he rarely goes out, how is he to meet his future wife?

Lunar Calculation vs Seasonal (Xia) Calculation

There are two different methods of calculating the Pillars of Destiny. That is by using either the Lunar or Seasonal Calendar.

Geomancy.Net uses the Lunar method rather than the Seasonal Calendar. We DO NOT intend to support the use of the Seasonal Calendar even though we have already a Xia calculation module.

Why not? The answer is very simple. Most of the calculation or analysis done my many practitioner who have been greatly influence by the Hong Kong practitioners uses ONLY the Xia calendar. This calendar is used by them, because they often reference it for their daily calendar. And it is also easy to chart out the chart for the Xia only calendar as it is fixed to as close as the Solar Calendar (Western calendar). Every 30 days is considered one  month.

The lunar calendar however, it different as it uses the actual moon location to determine the month. Furthermore, the key difference in the two version lies mainly in the month pillar only. This means that the main difference lies with the actual date of birth being considered as one or one month forward.

By right, the Pillars of Destiny chart should consist of the actual month (lunar month) character rather then the brought forwarded month (xia month) character. Often, the difference in Lunar and Xia month days are considered missing dates which Xia month completely ignores.

This is wrong, as many advance technique to determine as this month in inauspicious for marriage for example references these missing dates. And if this is completely ignored, such analysis is completely inaccurate for people who fall within these period.

Furthermore, many of the other pillars and etc, often have another formula to convert to the Xia month for correct reference to the Seasonal influence. In the lunar method, these have to recalculated. However, in the Xia method, these are already convered. So it is easier to for the practitioners. All these are done at the expense of those who fall in the grey dates.

So due to these the key changes ends up in the Luck period analysis. We have found from our several thousands of testing, that the Lunar calendar and Xia calendar version have no difference except for those who fall in these grey periods. And for people who fall in these grey periods, the Lunar calendar method is very much more accurate then the Xia calendar.

Thus, for this purpose since our we are already using a computer to calculate the chart, we might as well make it more accurate with the complex calculation rather then using the quick and easy method. Thus, we stick by the use of Lunar rather than the Xia, and have made sure that we have completely stick to the original and traditional lunar method and rulesets.

Do we really need to take the location factor into account?

Well, it is said that if we do have the location factor, it will make it more accurate in the analysis.

However, personally, geomancy.net finds that this is absolutely not necessary.

Why? This is because if you really understand the Pillars of Destiny as we really do, there is no need to worry about the hour of birth.

Remember that most of the analysis done by the Pillars of Destiny is for 10-yearly, 5 yearly, and at most yearly. Normally, we do not recommend monthly analysis (although it is possible.)

So is there really a big difference if the chart is several hours off?

The Hour factor will help determine one of the additional pillars in the version 8. But does not have much additional effect on the version 7 report.

The hour pillars will provide 1 additional pillars to the day, hour and month. And it will to some extend have some effect on the final analysis of the strong or weak element. But that is the main key influence.

It does not influence the Month or year pillar all. And since it does not affect that two, which happens to be the deciding factor of the 10-yearly and yearly analysis. It has very little impact in terms of the final analysis, unless the element of hour pillar is determined to the change the basic element strength.

Pillars of Destiny was designed with the concept that it helps to chart your heavenly luck. And all that is really needed is the DAY, MONTH and YEAR. If these three pillars are inaccurate your entire analysis will be wrong.

The hour pillar, house of life and house of conception which is considered the additional pillars can be ignored and a basic analysis can still be done. So what these additional pillars do is to try to provide more accurate analysis, but is not 100% necessary. Thus, even if it miss a little, it will have little impact.

So should I take the GMT timezone into account?

Our answer is no. You should not take the GMT timezone (+0800) etc to adjust your date of birth. This is because due to the many simplification in the GMT timezone, it only takes into account a shift in one of the location factor in the world.

The more accurate way is to take the timezone in accordance with the moon location. However, for most cases, it is different to provide the actual location where you are born. Thus, if you provide an inaccurate location factor, you risk the chance of making the report LESS accurate than NOT adjusting anything at all.

As mentioned, the initial pillars of destiny is already so flexible and forgiving in ignoring the hour of  birth, thus it has already put in some possibility of mistakes in the hour of birth. Thus, we feel that you can safely ignore or do not concentrate so much on this factor.

This is why, it is simple yet the most effective divinity method unlike western astrology.

For  example, many caculations under the Pillars of Destiny use  only one pillar e.g. Year. Some use Month while others use  Day of birth.

The  traditional Practice uses at least three meaning: Year, Month, Day and if necessary the Hour. However, the more  variables given the more accurate it will be.

Ask  any Pillars of Destiny expert and they can by looking at  a person's luck pillar and compare this to his life experence (usually at least 3 pillars are used) and the expert can easily deduce one's Hour Pillar.

Furthermore, lots of Pillars of Destiny experts do not take into the  time zone. For example, Raymond Lo, of Hong Kong who had  already written three Pillars of Destiny books from his examples in the book he does not take into time zone calculation of famous personalities e.g. Margaret Thacher, Elton John, Ronald Reagan, Saddam Hussien. and many many more.

What happens if I do not know the time of birth?

Ideally, it is best to know the time of birth but this is not compulsory  as we understand that some of us do not have this information.  A pillars of destiny Expert can by looking at a person's luck pillars and compare this with his/her personal life experience `work backwards' and accurately predict his time of birth. The most important information are a person's YEAR, MONTH and DAY of birth. With these three information,  an accurate prediction can still be made and this has been done by many Feng Shui Masters. Our software program currently requires you to input the TIME field, this would be revised  in the next version to cater to those who do not know this  information.

How can I use the Pillars of Destiny?

True Birth Element - The Pillars of Destiny is one of the Feng Shui Tools which can accurately determine you true birth element. This true birth element is constantly around various elements, seasons and people. When you are constantly surrounded by elements that are favourable to you, you will be in good luck.

Wealth Anlaysis - See if you are destined to be wealth or not! And also what elements in your life is considered your wealth deity. This is important as you can indirectly induce wealth into your life.

80 Year luck periods - Knowing which of the years are good for you, allows you to take advantage of it. For example, if in Period 3 (Age 30) you are in good luck, this means that if you want to start your own business, you will be able to do well etc. Or simply know when to and how to improve your life.

Yearly luck periods - Currently version 7 gives you each year's analysis of the pillars.

Clashes, Harms, Punishements in your Elements - Clashes in your elements, allow you to know in advance any disaster that may befall you and thus allowing you to do something to prevent or reduce the bad influences.

10 Deities - This allows for analysising your wealth, marriage, intelligence etc. For example, you can tell if you are wealthly or not.

More - Lots more of other uses which will be included in future versions of the Online Report.

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