作者序
Gwan-Hwan Hwang (黃冠寰)
Even as of now, it is still very hard for me to believe that I am publishing a book about BaZi. As an engineer by training and a researcher in academic for over 20 years, mastering BaZi was
never part of my plan. When I first started years ago, all I wanted to find out was whether BaZi has any truth in it or simply is a thousand-year-old baloney. I did not have any teacher to
guide (or misled) me. I studied everything on my own, with the same systematic method I used in my academic research works. In my career I have published many papers and professional articles,
but never a book addressed to the general public. Allow me to start by asking you to bear with me if in any part of this book the use of words is less than perfect.
Contrary to most of the books about fortunetelling, the main objective of this book is to help debunk superstitions. There are a lot of fortunetellers who practice without trying to improve
or even verify their own analysis. Whenever the result is not accurate, they conveniently attribute it to Karma or some sort of will of divinity. They are never wrong because they always say
things that are ambiguous and unverifiable, with the sole purpose to scam more money out of the client’s pocket. Those who fall for their scheme often lose a lot more than just money. Some
happy couples are torn apart. Others simply do not dare to enter relationship. Some even send their children away for adoption because some fortuneteller tells them that keeping their children
in the family could threaten their own lives. All these are, undoubtedly, superstitions, and should be condemned by all.
The art of fortune telling, especially BaZi, was considered highly valuable in ancient China. Each school of practitioners guarded their knowledge as the top secret. Many of them did so by
spreading out false or misleading information so that they can keep the real knowledge within. This is why we are seeing so many false knowledge and superstition in the art of BaZi today. The
only way to restore the knowledge to its purest essence is to study it with a scientific and logical attitude. I hope that this book can serve as a beginning of such endeavor.
The influence of BaZi and Five Element to one’s luck and life, although significant, is never absolute. Learning BaZi helps us understand the influence of the energies around us, but the
purposes is to help us better plan our moves, not to make us submissive. We are still the masters of our lives. All we have to do is to incorporate the influence of BaZi as we plan ahead and
maintain a proactive attitude.
Learning BaZi not only gave me the ability to help others, it also helped change my perspective toward life with a more open-minded and inclusive way. I become more interested in the topic of
philosophy and life, and more willing to help others. Not only I make constant charity donation from the income of my BaZi practice, I also urge my clients to do the same.
I would like to thank my wife Hsin-Fen, who co-authored this book with me. Hsin-Fen has been my greatest help throughout the course of my BaZi study. She is a smart lady and is a lot more
sensitive in personal interactions than I am. Therefore she can always provide me valuable feedback. A lot of insights and findings that I developed came from her inputs. I always discussed
every case with her.
Since the first edition in Chinese was published, our readers have provided us lots of positive feedbacks. Such recognition is the best reward that drives us forward. We have also received
lots of questions from readers (
[email protected]). We always replied each one of them as best as we could. Many readers even visited us in-person. Some of them come all the
way to Taiwan from Hong Kong, Singapore, USA, and Canada. I have always been moved seeing that each of them carrying a copy of this book filled with their footnotes and remarks all over the
pages. We really appreciate having such a group of supportive readers.
The basic principle of BaZi is simple, but applying it into real lives is a highly complicated art. I have the fortune to have a group of students, who identify with my idea of studying BaZi
in scientific and logical perspective, and strengthened our course along the way. For that we are thankful.
This is our first English version. We made a lot of efforts to help English readers cross through the cultural barriers, which could have been the most difficult part for non-Chinese speakers
to learn BaZi and perhaps the main reason that BaZi is less known outside the Chinese society. We believe that the principle of BaZi can be learned across cultures and does not need to be lost
in translation. With that in mind, we made unprecedented changes such as marking Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches with simple symbols (H1 – H12, E1 – E12) instead of sticking to the Chinese
phonetic translations (Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding,…). We also translate the Ten Spirits with the same principle – making it easy to understand for English readers, rather than sticking to the
phonetics.
Anther major effort we made in the English version is adding a number of case examples familiar to our English readers. The original Chinese version contains mostly examples of people in
Taiwan. To better relate the art of BaZi to our English readers, we added a number of cases examples of persons familiar to English readers, such as Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael
Jordan, Van Gogh, and the recent presidential campaigns of US (Trump vs. Clinton) and France (Macron vs. Le Pen). We believe that these examples will bring the art of BaZi closer to our English
speakers, and prove that the principle of BaZi is universal.
We are excited to have this book published. We hope you like our book and find the art of BaZi fascinating and look forward to any feedback you may have.
