What does the fortune teller mean by pinching his fingers? What does the fortune teller mean by pinching his fingers?

When it comes to "hand index", people naturally think of talkative and erratic charlatans and fortune tellers. Those people always brag about "observing the principles of heaven and earth and understanding ghosts and gods". Every time they do divination, they will do many mysterious rituals, and then begin to explain your past life and comment on your present life, which is very similar to "everything is ready".

In fact, it is not mysterious to "pinch fingers and calculate", and it is impossible to really calculate the future, let alone the so-called "secret". "Pinch fingers" is just that when the ancients counted, they put the information of heavenly stems, earthly branches, eight diagrams and five elements into the knuckles from the index finger to the little finger of their left hand in turn according to certain rules, and then counted them with their thumbs in turn by reciting formulas, so as to achieve the purpose of matching heavenly stems, earthly branches, eight diagrams and five elements, and facilitate the occupants to make predictions through the relationship between the five elements.

The following is a brief introduction to the contents of two kinds of "pinching fingers".

Friends who are familiar with the Book of Changes know that there are two basic divination methods in the field of Yi-ology: Fuxi innate gossip and Wang Wen's gossip the day after tomorrow, both of which are the basis of divination in the Book of Changes. In order to conveniently memorize gossip in the form of "nine squares", the ancients found a natural memory carrier-left palm. Because everyone's index finger, middle finger and ring finger have three knuckles respectively, together they form a natural "nine squares". If the gossip information is recorded in the palm of your hand, the occupants 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 the pen to record the calculation results at any time. If he is left-handed, he will choose his right hand. The picture below shows the eight diagrams memorized on the knuckles of the operator's left hand.

After the eight diagrams are arranged, the operator can match the numbers with the eight diagrams by formulas, which is convenient for "judging hexagrams by numbers" and subsequent calculation. For example, the formula of gossip the day after tomorrow is "one counts hurdles, two counts Kun, three counts earthquakes, four counts points, five posts in the palace, six posts, seven against eight, and nine stays at the door". In addition, in addition to the correspondence between numbers and hexagrams, the eight-palace hexagrams system in Fang Jing, which is based on the acquired eight diagrams, also incorporates the five elements into the eight palaces, as shown above. It should be noted here that the direction of gossip is due west, due south and due north of Zuo Dong!

In addition to gossip, ancient calculators also used heavenly stems and earthly branches (commonly known as "time horoscope") to represent the year, month and day, so as to calculate with five elements. Before arranging, we need to know the arrangement of the five elements on the knuckles. This arrangement is basically the same as the arrangement of the five elements in the Fang Jing Eight Gong Gua system just mentioned, with only a small difference, as shown in the following figure.

After understanding the knuckle areas corresponding to the five elements, we classify heavenly stems and earthly branches as "A, B, C, D, E, Ji, Ke, Xin, Ren, Kui" and "Zi, Ugly, Yin, Mao, Chen, Si, Wu, Wei, Shen, You, Qi and Hai" respectively. See the arrow below for details. After the branches are arranged, the corresponding five elements will be clear at a glance, such as A and B belong to wood, C and D belong to fire, and there are water and ugly soil.

With these laws, the ancients could easily match the complex information such as branches and gossip with the five elements with their fingers, and then carry out the follow-up work of divination through the relationship between the five elements. Because of this ingenious rule, the operator can naturally "understand the principle of heaven and earth on one hand and the will of ghosts and gods on the other."