We met a Chinese medicine friend here. One of her patients was not only blind but also nearly paralyzed after a stroke. After her acupuncture treatment, the patient's vision has greatly improved and he can basically move on his own. "I didn't expect the effect to be so good. Chinese medicine is like this. It can't be explained by Western medicine, but it is effective." The friend said.
This is our traditional culture, Yin Yang, Five Elements, Zhouyi Bagua, which is quite magical. I myself was once fascinated by it, and I once read some of Zhouyi's books seriously. But in the end, I only scratched the surface of it and put it on the bookshelf.
I didn’t expect that the name would now come into contact with “traditional culture”. Among the letters that came to us to give names, quite a few asked for certain radicals, or even a certain number of gestures. Some said it was done by fortune telling, and some didn't, but it was pretty much the same. Some also told us the detailed time of birth, probably thinking that we would also be able to calculate birth dates and so on.
Since parents have requests, of course we must try our best to satisfy them. We don’t know how to arrange the horoscopes, but we can always look up the radicals in the dictionary. However, it is really difficult to come up with a name according to these requirements. For example, girls must be placed next to the word "fire", but most of the words next to the word "fire" are related to stoves. There are several words that are suitable for naming, and they are also more masculine. After checking again and again, I came up with "Chen Tongwei", which still looks a bit hot.
If you think about it carefully, assuming that naming according to the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams is a universal truth, it must be applicable to everyone. If foreigners don’t speak Chinese, doesn’t it apply? If it only applies to Chinese people, what should we do about Chinese children who were born abroad, want to acquire foreign nationality, and need to be named in a foreign language?
If you want to name according to radicals, which radicals count? For example, if you want to be next to "fire", some people say that dark fire (four points of water) will also work. What about those who are short of water? Can two o'clock of water be enough? Is it okay to prefix it with "rain"? It rained and there was a lot of water! If I want "earth", can it be placed next to the word "mountain"? Mountains are also made of soil! If you want "gold", can you stand next to a knife? Where can I find "industry standards"?
As for the names that need to be defined according to fortune telling, should they be based on simplified Chinese characters or traditional Chinese characters? If we talk about simplified Chinese characters, traditional Chinese characters are the "authentic" ones! If we use traditional Chinese characters, but the children will write in simplified Chinese characters all their lives, will it still be effective? What's more, there are traditional Chinese characters from different eras, and the most "authentic" one is the oracle bone inscriptions. At that time, there were only a few hundred characters in a word, and they were still pictographic, and many of them didn't even have radicals! It's quite difficult to operate.
It’s both radicals and strokes. It saves trouble for the fortune teller to just make requests. If fortune-telling is effective, people's fates are ever-changing and can be calculated by fortune-telling. There are only a few thousand commonly used Chinese characters, and there are only more than a thousand common Chinese characters suitable for names (according to the "Ten Thousand Names Statistics"). Simply calculate a name by fortune telling. That's it, why go to all this trouble?
Everyone can have their own opinion on whether naming according to fortune telling is a superstitious element in traditional culture. Even without discussing these, from the perspective of naming, according to our experience, it is not advisable to choose a name based on fortune telling.
We have all written propositional essays. For example, "an unforgettable thing". I have been studying for more than ten years and have always written about ten or eight things. But now, I probably can't remember any of these "unforgettable" things! Once the topic is too restrictive, unless the topic is just right, you often have to piece it together. It is not easy to write an article with true feelings. The same goes for naming. If there are too many restrictions, there will be no room for imagination and creativity.
The five elements are "metal, wood, water, fire, and earth", and each element has five radicals. The number of characters suitable for naming is limited. It is difficult to choose a name. You must choose a name according to the five elements. It is obvious that you are at odds with yourself. If you add gestures, it will be even more difficult.
In such a small range of choices, it would be good to be able to come up with a name. If it also needs to be "not cliché, not condescending, meaningful (for example, taken from a certain poem, article, or symbol), and sounds nice and elegant," It’s really hard to be elegant but not lively.” In order to make such a "proposal composition", we often look through dictionaries, books, and think hard. It is several times more difficult than coming up with a name that does not require fortune telling. Some names took a long time to come up with, but they still have a sense of carving, and they don't have the feeling of being blurted out in one go like "Liu Fifeng".