Fate or Tendency? What These Systems Actually Claim

Sooner or later, everyone who has a chart read asks the same question, usually out loud: so is this going to happen?

The popular versions of BaZi and Western astrology mostly answer yes. The chart is a verdict, the reading is the verdict read aloud, and the newspaper column or the app notification tells you what's coming.

The traditions themselves are more divided. Each has a hard answer, that what you're born with is a sentence, and a soft one, that it's a lean. Each argued the point for centuries, and on both sides the soft answer ended up with the weightier names behind it.

I've compared how the two systems work. This post is about what they claim to do.

Two words, not one

The Chinese word at the centre of this is 命, mìng. It means a decree, a mandate, a lifespan — and fate. Fortune-telling in Chinese is 算命, "calculating mìng."

But 命 rarely travels alone. Its partner is 運, yùn: luck, timing, the turn of the wheel. The everyday Chinese word for destiny, 命運, is simply the two together. Korean and Japanese write the same pair the other way round, 運命.

BaZi keeps the two apart. The natal chart is the 命局, the layout of your mìng, fixed at birth. The ten-year luck pillars, 大運, are yùn: they move on, and so does every year. The strength verdict is a judgement of the first. The decades are the second.

And BaZi is younger than the argument this post is about. The day-master method is credited to Xu Ziping, a tenth-century figure, and the first two writers below lived long before him. BaZi inherited this debate. It didn't start it.

China's hard line

The most thorough theorist of fate in early China was Wang Chong, a first-century philosopher better known as a sceptic. His stated mission was 疾虛妄, hating the false and the empty, and he spared no one: his Lunheng has chapters titled "Questioning Confucius" and "Criticizing Mencius."

Fate, he kept. He even thought it was easy to see:

人曰命難知。命甚易知。知之何用？用之骨體。

People say fate is hard to know. Fate is very easy to know. How do you know it? By the bones.

Fate is received at birth, he argued, and it shows on the body. Reading it there is like reading a grain measure to see how much it holds. (Lunheng, chapter 11, 骨相.)

The Lunheng (論衡, "Discourses Weighed in the Balance") also records a scheme the Confucian scholars of his day taught, with three kinds of fate. 正命, the fate you're born with, brings good fortune of its own accord. 隨命, the fate that follows conduct, rewards effort and punishes indulgence. 遭命, the fate you run into, strikes the good anyway.

Wang Chong set it out in order to take it apart:

言隨命則無遭命，言遭命則無隨命。

Say fate follows conduct, and there's no fate you run into. Say there's a fate you run into, and fate doesn't follow conduct.

(Lunheng, chapter 6, 命義.) The scholars couldn't have both, and Wang Chong's own answer was the hard one. Conduct doesn't cause fortune. What you're born with, and what you happen to run into, is what you get.

China's soft line

Four centuries before Wang Chong, and one of his targets, Mencius had drawn the line the other way:

莫非命也，順受其正。是故知命者，不立乎巖牆之下。

Everything is fate — but accept the fate that is properly yours. So one who understands fate does not stand beneath a wall that is about to fall.

He goes on: to die having followed your way to the end is proper fate; to die in chains is not. (Mencius 7A:2.)

His phrase for "proper fate" is 正命, the same term the scholars' scheme would later use for the fate you're born with. They meant different things by it. For the scholars, 正命 was the fortune your birth hands you. For Mencius, it was only the fate you meet while doing what you should. Someone crushed by a wall they chose to stand under still met a fate, just not their proper one.

Popular wisdom settled on a ranking. A nineteenth-century novel quotes it as a common saying, 一命二運三風水 — first fate, second luck, third feng shui — and a sentence later extends it: fourth, good done without credit; fifth, study. Fate is first on the list. It's also one item of five, and the last two are things you do.

The man who stopped trying

One of the most widely read Chinese books about fate is the story of someone changing his.

In his youth, Yuan Huang, a Ming scholar, had his life read by an old man named Kong, who worked by a numerological method rather than BaZi. Kong named the rank he would place in each exam and a county he would one day govern in Sichuan. He would have no son. He would die in his own bed in his fifty-third year, on the fourteenth day of the eighth month, between one and three in the morning.

The next year's exams came out exactly as predicted, rank for rank, and so did every result after them. Yuan stopped wanting anything. If it was all fixed, what was the point?

In 1569 he visited a Chan master named Yungu and sat facing him for three days and nights without closing his eyes. Yungu asked how he had gone three days without a single stray thought. Yuan said that Kong had calculated everything, honour and disgrace, life and death, so even if he wanted a stray thought, there was nothing left to have one about.

Yungu laughed.

我待汝是豪傑，原來只是凡夫。

I took you for a remarkable man. You're just an ordinary one.

Later in the same conversation he gave Yuan the line the book is remembered for, 命由我作，福自己求 — we make our own fate, and seek our own fortune — and said it was only what the classics had always taught.

Yuan took a new name that day: 了凡, Liaofan, roughly done with the ordinary. He changed how he lived, had a son, outlived the prediction by two decades, and in his late sixties wrote it all down for that son. Liaofan's Four Lessons (了凡四訓) has been read ever since.

It's his own account, written long after the fact by a father with a lesson to teach, so hold it as the tradition's argument rather than a record. But it's the argument the tradition chose to keep.

The West's hard line

The West's hard line has its own first-century champion. Manilius, a Roman poet, put it into verse in his Astronomica:

Fata regunt orbem, certa stant omnia lege.

Fate rules the world; everything stands on fixed law.

Two lines later: nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet. We begin to die as we are born, and the end hangs from the beginning. (Astronomica 4.14–16.)

That's the chart as a sentence, in Latin hexameter, written in the same century as Wang Chong's Lunheng and half a world away.

The West's soft line

More than a century later, Ptolemy, the astronomer whose model of the heavens stood for some fourteen hundred years, wrote the Tetrabiblos, a four-book manual of astrology, and in its opening chapters argued against the hard line.

His case runs like this. Astrology is possible, but it's fallible, and its practitioners often get it wrong. Events don't come to each person by some irrevocable decree, bound to happen whatever else intervenes. Some outcomes have causes too strong to turn aside. Others can be averted by someone who sees them coming, the way a physician can tell which illnesses will kill and which will respond to treatment. And where something can't be averted, knowing in advance lets you meet it calmly.

Eleven centuries after that, Thomas Aquinas drew the line more precisely. The stars act on bodies, he argued, not on the will. Most people follow their passions, and passions run through the body, so an astrologer will often be right about people in general — and can never be sure of any one person, because that person can choose. The astrologers, he noted, had a saying for it themselves: the wise man rules the stars. (Summa Theologiae I, q. 115, a. 4.)

The Latin tag often attached to him, astra inclinant, non necessitant, the stars incline but don't compel, isn't his wording. It is his position, and it's the answer a great many astrologers still give.

Two traditions, one argument

Both hard lines were written in the same century, at opposite ends of Eurasia.

Neither argument ever closed. The soft line kept the canon. The Mencius became one of the Four Books that Chinese exam candidates memorised for six centuries, and the Tetrabiblos was a standard authority for astrologers in Europe and the Islamic world for well over a thousand years. The hard line kept the marketplace. Readers in both traditions have always predicted events outright, and the popular versions still do.

What a chart actually contains

Here's the part that isn't philosophy. A BaZi chart is eight characters, with their elements, their relations to the day master, the season they fall in, and the clashes and combinations between them. There is no event in it. No wedding, no promotion, no illness. Nothing that happens.

What a chart can say is conditional. This day master carries more than it's fed. Its month works against it. This decade brings the element it's short of; the next one piles on what it already has too much of. Those are statements about conditions. Turning them into "you'll marry in 2029" is a step the reader takes. The chart doesn't supply it.

Readers have always taken that step — Kong named the day and the hour of Yuan Huang's death. When someone does it, it's worth knowing they're adding a layer the chart doesn't contain.

Where this site stands

The introductory post says a chart does not predict events. This is the longer argument for why, and the readings here are written on its side, on purpose.

When a reading includes your current ten-year luck pillar, it names the decade, says how that decade's element stands to your day master, and whether it feeds the chart or drains it. It doesn't name events, amounts, diagnoses, or ages inside the decade. Those are left out deliberately, because the chart doesn't contain them.

That's the claim a chart can actually support. It's also one Mencius and Ptolemy would recognise, and I think it's the more useful one. A sentence can only be served. A lean can be worked with.

Whether either claim, hard or soft, holds up when it's tested is a different question from what the systems claim, and it gets its own post.

What the soft line offered, in both traditions, was never a verdict. It was Mencius's wall: knowing which way you lean is how you know where not to stand.