Till recently, the practice of Qi Men was shrouded in secrecy and the usual intrigue that surrounds the relatively unknown, till Joey Yap simplified it in order to bring it to the Western world.

IS IT SUPERIOR TO THE OTHER SYSTEMS WE ALREADY KNOW?

As a seasoned practitioner, it has taken me a while to understand what magic can actually be achieved by this particular system, and what makes it superior to all the other systems we have been using, very successfully, I may add, for the past 15 years. I have been initially playing with it since November 2013, and now use it daily, for my personal ventures as well as a must in all my consultations.

What I have gathered is that each system has its position in a complex mix of tools that are used to help a client. Every system has its application and uses, and are not replaceable by any other. Used correctly, every system contributes in their own specific way.

For instance, traditionally, I used to start any assignment with a BaZi reading to understand where exactly the client stood at that point in time, regardless of their request for a BaZi reading or not. I also looked at the BaZi chart of the hour they arrived. This gave me a fair idea of the nature of the problem and pointed me to the right direction of discussion. Now I begin by looking at the Qi Men chart for the hour I first connected with them, and so clearly, it points to the area of their problem. Very often, a client comes saying one thing, but the Qi Men says something else, and this is what we are then actually looking at as the main issue. Qi Men can do that better than any other system.
While BaZi can lead you to the forest, Qi men will show you the tree.

IS IT THE SAME AS GOING TO A MASTERY ACADEMY CLASS?
Let me assure you that by no means is my class a substitute for Joey Yaps classes, which every serious student must attend, if for nothing else, just the sheer magical flow of his chart readings, which clearly put into perspective, how a chart must be read. Nobody can do it like him, and I just hope that you can use the learning of my class, to make things easier when you do attend his classes, some day soon. Meanwhile, what you learn with me will empower you to get the full depth of his teachings as you will then be able to get the finer points of his teachings instead of wrestling with the basics.

WHAT WILL YOUR CLASS TEACH?
My class will do what I do best, clarify the basics, re-affirm the essential understanding, show you HOW to approach each problem and set you well on your way to interpreting a Qi Men chart in whatever application you desire. There are many approaches, and they are all different based on what you want to use it for. Presently there is a lot of confusion on methods and techniques, I will help put it all into perspective. In addition, you will get all your information clearly set out in charts and manuals that make the evaluation of your readings as easy as, well, 123….

Being a full-time practitioner, I will share invaluable information based on my own day to day use, practical ways of doing things including my charts and shortcuts, and a bonus, free chart plotting software.

IS QI MEN VERY COMPLICATED?
Yes and no. Now it could be, and after my class NO!
Actually in the beginning, Qi Men can be very intimidating. It doesn’t help, either, when a Qi men chart looks so complicated. It is made up of multiple layers, Initially very intimidating, but once it is actually broken up piecemeal, one can easily understand the chart and interpreting it becomes a breeze.
Needless to say, you need to have a basic working knowledge of the 5 elements, a little bit of the hexagrams and the stems & the branches. Knowing a few of the Chinese characters always helps. All of the above has been included in the introductory material. Reference manuals will be suggested during the class and as long as you know how to get from point A to point B, (which I will teach you), it is easy enough to use all the Mastery Academy Reference Series manuals, hard or ebooks, to support you. Initially it will be impossible (and unnecessary) to know all this information by heart, but as time goes by, a lot of it will come to you automatically.

While there has been plenty of literature on the subject, the authenticity of the sources is either questionable or simply not easily understood. Just having access to books, or professing knowledge of the Chinese language so as to be able to read them, is not enough to know how to practice QiMen. (There is no such thing as Chinese language by the way, China has umpteen number of spoken languages, dialects & sub-dialects so much so that someone from one province cannot really understand someone from another province, let alone decipher the contents of ancient volumes). Imagine going to a doctor who studied only by reading books, and never actually went to college, in a language that was not his mother? Get the drift?

SO WHAT THEN 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 QiMen 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 QiMen 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.

SO 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 have been explored in detail in the primer so its not required to panic and faint at this stage.

Understanding QiMen 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 LUOSHU. 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 analyze the meanings of the symbols in relation to questions asked. Any Qi Men Dun Jia ju may be interpreted or analyzed 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 luoshu, and a luoshu is…. well never mind, look at the primer.

SYLLABUS OF MY UPCOMING QI MEN COURSES:

There are many forms of Qi Men. A Qi Men chart can be very flexible and dynamic and if you get the hang of it, can answer pretty much whatever you need to know. We are going to cover the following in our Qi Men 123.

1. Introduction: This will take you through the basic principles that cover all Qi Men studies.
2. Qi Men Strategic Execution: The most exciting part, this will teach you how to use timing based on the structures and components in a Qi men chart customized to your particular requirements to obtain a particular outcome.
3. Qi Men Feng Shui: this will tell you how good or bad a property is and each of the aspects of the property can be analyzed by an individual aspect of the Qi men chart. It will tell you how to assess the cosmic influence on the property or the destiny of the property, the environmental influence, the source of potential problems and what the possible outcome can be if one uses or buys a property.
4. Qi Men Destiny Analysis: This helps you to assess the quality of your life through various time periods, similar to BaZi but very different in many ways. It defines which forces you can rely on more than others and can predict, very similar to a BaZi chart.
5. Qi Men Forecasting: This is the most amazing section that helps you alter the outcome by creating a forecast, as opposed to “accepting destiny”. You can cast a chart to answer any question at the time and get very in-depth accurate advice.
6. War-craft: a quick run through of the 36 stratagems and advice on how to use it.

Qi Men is quick & exciting and chillingly accurate. It depends on the here and now aspect and is a form of divination in most applications. In my practice, it has a place that I cannot do without, I use it as a pointer to begin with and at the end to make sure I am on the right track.

I hope that we can share the Qi Men journey together.