One
day, a woman whose husband had left home for a long time went to seek advice
from the famous diviner Li Chun Feng 李淳風（602AD－670AD）.
Li was not home and his son opened the door. The woman said, “My husband left
home 6 months ago and I want to ask your father for a divination.” While
she was talking, her fan dropped to the floor and the face of the fan severed
from the bones. Li’s son said, “The flesh separates from the bones - you will never see him again 骨肉分離，不得相見矣.” The woman was very sad and went home weeping.
On the way she met Li who was going home. She told him
what his son said. It was still the Chen hour 辰時.
Li got the hexagram Dui on Kun with line 3 moving to Dui
on Gen.
He told the woman, “You are dressed properly when you
see your father but you are undressed when you see your husband 穿衣見父，脱衣見夫. Go home and prepare good dinner to welcome your
husband tonight.”
Li’s son was too hasty to draw conclusion with only the
external inference from the fan dropping
to the floor. His father got
the hexagram, the core of
the divination. Even in the original book “Mei Hua Xin Yi 梅花心易” the use of the hexagrams was not disclosed in this example. This makes the story incomplete and
the explanation not convincing. To learn the full version of Plum Blossom
Divination, go
there: http://www.astro-fengshui.com/courses/plum%20blossom.html .
3 comments:
What a great example of Meihua Yishu, Joseph. Maybe another indication of the husband's return is the change from hexagram 45 to hexagram 31. The former hexagram consists of only yin hexagrams, iow no male, while the latter hexagram has one yin and one yang trigram. The Judgement text of 31 is also favourable in this matter.
Is this an example from the original Meihua Yishu book?
It is from the original Meihua Yishu book but the hexagram and moving line are my addition according to the original method. The example in the book is incomplete and may be misleading as no hexagram was mentioned. We cannot blame Li's son for the wrong interpretation if Meihua Yishu does not use hexagrams.
Joseph
To me this is a good example of how correlative thinking used in divination, in this case based on images, has to combine with analytical thinking to be judicious. Master Li knew how a fan made for a male is different to a fan made for a female, so it can fall apart fully, whereas his son thought all fans are made the same way and came to a different conclusion - being broken instead of falling away.
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