Text/Wu Yue Speaking of "calculating with fingers", everyone will naturally think of those quack magicians and fortune tellers who talk eloquently and move erratically. Those people always pride themselves on "observing the principles of heaven and earth, and understanding the will of ghosts and gods." Every time they perform a divination, they perform a lot of mysterious rituals, and then, with a few calculations, they begin to talk about your past life and your predictions. When you judge your life, you feel like you have the world in your hands. In the eyes of ordinary people, their hands are mysterious and unpredictable. So what kind of mystery is hidden in their hands? Let the author share it with you today. In fact, "calculating with fingers" is not mysterious. It cannot really calculate the future, let alone the so-called "secret". "Pinching fingers" means that the ancients arranged the heavenly stems, earthly branches, eight trigrams, five elements and other information into the knuckles of the left index finger to little finger according to certain rules when doing calculations, and then counted the heavenly stems, earthly branches, and the five elements in sequence with their thumbs by silently reciting the formula. The purpose of matching the Earthly Branches, Bagua and the Five Elements is to facilitate the fortune tellers to make predictions based on the relationships between the Five Elements. The following is a brief introduction to two types of "calculate with fingers" content. Friends who are familiar with the I Ching know that there are two basic sets of divination methods in the field of Yi studies: Fuxi's innate Bagua diagram and Wen Wang's Houtian Bagua diagram. These two diagrams are the basis for I Ching divination in later generations. In order to facilitate the memory of the Bagua diagram in the form of "Nine Palaces", the ancients found a natural memory carrier - the palm of the left hand. Because everyone's index finger, middle finger and ring finger each have three knuckles, so when put together they form a natural "Nine-Gong Grid". If the information of the Bagua diagram is recorded on the palm of the hand, the person can call the calculation at any time. . So why choose "left hand"? The author believes that this is probably because the right hand needs to hold a pen to record the calculation results at any time. If he is "left-handed", then he will choose the "right hand". The picture below is the Bagua chart that the fortune teller memorizes on the knuckles of his left hand. After getting the eight trigrams arranged, the fortune teller can match the numbers with the eight trigrams by using the formulas, which will facilitate "starting hexagrams with numbers" and subsequent calculations. For example, the formula of Houtian Bagua is "One number is Kanxi, two number is Kun, three earthquakes and four sundas are in the middle, five are in the palace and six are in the palace, seven are in eight and nine are in the door." In addition, in addition to the correspondence between numbers and hexagrams, the Jingfang Ba Gong Gua system based on acquired trigrams also assigns the five elements to the eight palaces, as shown in the picture above. It should be noted here that the directions of the Bagua diagram are left, east, right, west, up, south, and down! In addition to the Eight Diagrams, ancient calculators also included the heavenly stems and earthly branches (commonly known as the "eight characters of time") used to record the year, month, day and time, so as to facilitate calculations based on the five elements. Before we arrange the arrangement, we need to first understand the arrangement of the five elements on the knuckles. This arrangement is basically the same as the arrangement of the five elements in the Jingfang Ba Gong Gua system just mentioned, with only a few minor differences. See the figure below for details. After understanding the corresponding knuckle areas of the five elements, we then classify the heavenly stems and earthly branches according to "A, B, B, D, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin, Ren, Kui" and "Zi, Chou, Yin, Mao, "Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Xu, Hai" are arranged in order, but the direction of arrangement is particular. The arrangement of "Heavenly Stems" is in the shape of Arabic numeral "3", and the arrangement of "Earthly Branches" is in the shape of Arabic numeral "3". The sort order takes on a "pinwheel" shape. See the arrow in the figure below for details. After the stems and branches are arranged, the corresponding five elements will be clear at a glance. For example, A and B belong to wood, C and D belong to fire, and Zi belongs to water, and Chou belongs to earth, etc. With these rules, the ancients could easily match complex information such as stems, branches, and eight trigrams with the five elements by just moving their fingers, and then use the relationship between the five elements to perform subsequent hexagram interpretation and divination. Because of this ingenious rule, fortune tellers can naturally "understand the principles of heaven and earth and understand the will of ghosts and gods." Having said this, I believe that everyone will no longer feel mysterious and unfamiliar with "calculating with fingers", and will be impressed by the exquisiteness and greatness of our Chinese culture.
Thousands of years ago, in an agricultural society with relatively low productivity, our ancestors were able to use a philosophical thinking that transcended the times to abstract the "ultimate laws of the universe and human society" into "things that can be completely grasped with one hand." "Symbols", and through the interaction of these symbols, it perfectly interprets the philosophy of "Unity of Nature and Man", it is really amazing!