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Bushi Zhengzong · The Orthodox Tradition of Divination
Golden Counsels · Adding Members to the Household
Read in English. Switch to Original for word notes, or select text to ask a question.
Adding Members to the Household
A solitary man in the world should not say that having no son leaves him without feeling. A gentleman managing a household can hardly serve as his own servant.
Attendants are needed to carry out one’s commands in the present. Without an adopted child, how could the ancestral line continue afterward?
Reading note: The supplied 使嬖 is rendered in its household-service sense. 螟蚙 is read through the traditional adoption metaphor, without inventing a biological child.
Distinguish what the person has come to ask, and only then know the governing Useful line. Useful should not move: moving, the person will be difficult to retain.
The governing image must not be injured; injured, it must meet an early end.
Declining and entering the Tomb predicts listlessness and failure to rise. Strong and occupying Self assures accomplishment in putting affairs in order.
Moving into Void describes someone who begins but does not finish. Snake combining with Officer and Ghost describes someone with many schemes and little virtue.
Dark Warrior changing into Brothers requires guarding the doorway against entry and departure. Green Dragon joined to Blessing and Virtue permits entrusting property for management.
Encountering excess or Void instead means little sincerity together with laziness.
The Useful line generating or combining with Self means gaining that person’s efforts. The governing image controlling or clashing with Body makes the person’s heart difficult to win.
Wealth changing into Descendants means bringing a child along. Self combining with Body means being favored and employed throughout life.
Injury from moving or changed lines makes satisfaction difficult later. Assistance from day and month ensures a later result according to one’s wishes.
Self and Hexagram Body value harmony. Brothers together with Officer and Ghost is best still.
Reading note: The supplied 兄動 is read through the corresponding 兄同 wording, referring to Brothers together with Officer and Ghost. The Chinese graphic is not changed.
Brothers and Ghost crossing or heavy gives real fear of future litigation. Bound by threefold combination, know that going forward will be futile.
At an intervening line, the broker is working a trick. In an empty place, it is merely the seller contending for money.
Two Officers and two Parents in the images means the affair involves two sides. Brothers and Ghost, one moving and one clashed: do not hand over the money into one person’s hands.
Response generating Self means the other person comes to me. Self generating Response means I go to seek the other person.
Harmony and combination makes agreement easy, but most fears the day clashing and breaking it. Mutual clash makes completion difficult, but especially welcomes generation and support from a moving image.
Brothers moving means deceit and emptiness. The images rising in confusion means repeated changes.
No Parents in the six lines means no one presides over the contract. Both intervening lines empty means no person yet acts between the parties.
Self receiving generation from an intervening line welcomes the intermediary’s support. Brothers emerging with generation and support requires guarding against collusion by the seller.
Parents changing into Brothers means a hollow contract and a false affair. Brothers holding Self means money disperses and the person leaves.
Response in Void means my efforts to complete the agreement are wasted. Self moving means even if the other person comes to arrange it, completion is difficult.
Brothers means a lack of money; Ghost must mean suspicion.
Reversal after reversal leaves the affair’s mechanism unsettled. A thousand changes and ten thousand transformations leave the images inconstant.
If one can seek the shape of what is unseen, one naturally understands what is yet to come.
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