WHAT IS QI MEN?
Qi Men Dun Jia (simplified Chinese: 奇门遁甲; traditional Chinese: 奇門遁甲; pinyin: Qí Mén Dùn Jiǎ) is an ancient form of divination from China, which is still used in China, Taiwan, Singapore and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. Qi Men Dun Jia along with Da Liu Ren and Tai Yi Shen Shu it is one of the collective Three Arts or Three Styles (三式 sān shì), China’s highest metaphysical arts.
Traditionally, Qi Men Dun Jia was a technique broadly applied to varied aspects of day to day life such as business, inaugurations, burials, crime-solving, marriages and matchmaking, medical divination, Feng Shui, military affairs, finding missing people and lost objects, initiating or undertaking travel, personal fortune divination and so on. The original system was devised to help form military strategy and tactics, basically to aid in Warfare, among other things, to decide when to proceed to war, using the “wind on your side” theory, which specified the time and precise direction to proceed to succeed in war after ensuring, with the usage and interpretation of the Qi Men charts, that the “force was with you”.
Today the battlefields translate into boardroom battles and the same principles are used to form strategy to beat the odds in day to day living and business. Correctly implemented, Qi Men can get you places you have never imagined and overcome difficult and seemingly impossible issues with perfect planning.
WHAT EXACTLY CAN QI MEN DO?
Practicing Qi Men successfully involves the understanding of how and where it can be applied efficiently. It is not a panacea for all ills, nor a one-stop shop for all issue solving. However, it can do what no other method of metaphysics can do, see into the future and help you alter the predictable outcome, in short it can not only teach you how to dodge the bullet but also deflect it. You need to understand how exactly the study can be deployed in order for it to help you properly.
While Qi Men is touted as a stand-alone system, in reality, a background of good Feng Shui understanding goes a long way in making your learning much simpler, and the implementation far more efficacious.
It is important to understand where Qi Men can be used and where it cannot. To be a perfect metaphysics practitioner, it is best to use the right tool for the right application. Qi Men cannot do what others methods can and vice versa. While your BaZi can tell you if generally you are in the right zone to say, get married, a quick Qi Men ask can help you decide if a particular girl “is the right one”. Qi Men is chillingly accurate about details, often glossed over in a BaZi chart. You can use it to fine tune actions to very specific outcomes, using direction, timings and tactics. No other practice gives you this level of precision.
On the flip side, use Qi Men to tell you initially if a property is good for you, but do not neglect to use Feng Shui for a proper analysis. In Qi Men Feng Shui, you can “see” a property without actually going there, or you can reasonably get a vision of what the property will bring to you by way of a prediction. This is particularly useful when you are unable to physically visit a site and have to give an instant answer.
HISTORY
Qi Men Dun Jia was in use as long ago as the period of Chinese history known as the Warring States, and is believed by Chinese scholars to have been used at the Battle of Red Cliffs in the defeat of Cao Cao’s ship-borne army. Liu Bowen is believed to have secured the throne for the Ming dynasty’s Hongwu Emperor by applying Qi Men Dun Jia to his strategic planning.
Over the centuries of Chinese history, Qi Men Dun Jia grew in popularity and was expanded to include a number of other types of divination, including medical divination, matchmaking, childbirth, travel, personal fortunes, and today includes contemporary applications, most notably, that of business and finance. Today Qi Men Dun Jia is especially popular in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong & Taiwan and surreptitiously in mainland China, and in some other nations of Southeast Asia.
HOW DO WE USE QI MEN DUN JIA?
Essentially, Qi Men Dun Jia is based on astronomical observations, and consists of various aspects of Chinese metaphysics, relying heavily on:
- The doctrines of yin and yang,
- The study of the five elements,
- Understanding of the eight trigrams,
- The Ten Heavenly Stems
- The Twelve Earthly Branches,
- The twenty-four solar terms or seasons
- 28 constellations.
These concepts will be explored in detail in the next posts, so its not required to panic and faint at this stage.
Understanding Qi Men begins with a look at the Qi Men Dun Jia chart or “cosmic board” that consists of a 3 X 3 magic square of nine palaces, also known commonly as a LUO SHU. This diagram consists of a basic chart of 9 squares which are then loaded, layer by layer by information that include:
- Heaven plate or heaven pan containing Stems
- Earth plate or Earth pan, also containing stems
- A spirit pan, also known as the 10 DEITIES
- The eight gates more commonly known as the 8 DOORS
- The star pan also known as the 9 stars
- The elements of the Luo Shu are also to be considered.
- Flying stars that appear as a single number in the chart.
- Death & Emptiness (DE)
- Horse Star (HS)
- 7 star power
- Structures
Some of these layers have elements and some don’t. It is important to remember this during analysis but don’t worry it is easy. You will be given each and every diagram that you will ever need.
These “pans” referred to are sets or layers of information also known as “plates” or in simple terms “layers”. The various symbols rotate around the palaces with each double hour, (one Chinese hour = two hours as we know them) either following the Luoshu path or the leaning palace method in yin or yang order. Skip this part if it sounds complicated, it is not relevant as you will be given the charts as required.
The above combinations of various “pans” and hours give you 1080 possible configurations that repeat in a predetermined pattern. This implies that every two hours you get a different predictable chart, one of the 1080 referred to above. These charts are characterised or identified by a series of descriptions starting with a Yin or a Yang, a number from 1-9 and finally by the hour, that uniquely identify each chart.
The Chinese hour is actually 120 minutes of two of the hours as we know them, hence we end up with a total of 1,080 different configurations which are commonly referred to as the 54 Yin and 540 Yang charts. These charts can describe (provided you know how to interpret them, which is the point of his course) situations (also known as «ju»)and are recycled four times per year, and are divided between the Yin and Yang halves of the year.
- The Yang charts begin from 21 or 22 December (Winter Solstice) until 21/22 June of the following year.
- The Yin charts follow starting from the 21/22 of June until 21/22 December of that year.
Each type of Qi Men Dun Jia divination carries its unique set of “Use Spirits”(Yong Shen). For example, medical divination relies mainly upon the Tian Rui Star, the Tian Xin Star, and Yi Qi. The task of the Qi Men Dun Jia analyst is to interpret and analyse the meanings of the symbols in relation to questions asked. Any Qi Men Dun Jia ju may be interpreted or analysed to respond to a wide variety of questions, or to solve a multitude of problems.
Qi Men Dun Jia is rooted in non-western concepts of time, where time takes on qualities and characteristics, and one segment of time is not necessarily comparable with another. The analyst makes reference to the configuration of the cosmic board at the time when a question is posed, or for birth times of individuals or corporate entities, such as businesses or nations. At times, the same or very similar configurations of the cosmic board will appear in relation to the same series of questions or problems.
A warning: Before embarking on any Qi Men studies, I would advise you to get some basic information under your belt. If you are armed with some background information, you will effortlessly understand what is going on in class. For those who sign up for my class, I have created a primer to take you through a few metaphysical terms and concepts to make you familiar with the system. For the first timer, in Qi Men terms, a stem is definitely not what appears on a plant and words like palace may sound like a royal residence when in fact it refers to one of the nine boxes in a Luo Shu, and a Luo Shu is…. well never mind, wait for the next posts.
Sherry Merchant
Qi Men Dun Jia 