Four Pillars Fortune-Telling Is Astrology, Not a Discipline
Today I criticize Monk Mungwang’s video titled “Four Pillars, Myeongri, and Seon.” Although Seon appears in the title, the actual content is devoted almost entirely to explaining and promoting four pillars fortune-telling. I see no reason to attach the word “discipline” to it.
It is no different from Western astrology that assigns personality and fate through Aquarius or Pisces. The claim that eight characters derived from the year, month, day, and hour of birth can reveal a person’s character and future has not even 0.001 percent evidence.
Four pillars fortune-telling is astrology dressed up to look substantial, a collection of delusions and nonsense from beginning to end.
The Conditions of Birth Tell More Than the Date of Birth
Knowing only the year, month, day, and hour when someone was born tells us nothing about that person. We can learn at least a little more by asking in what country, region, and era the person was born, whose descendant the person is, and among what parents, family, status, and environment the person grew up.
People born at the same moment can live radically different lives when they are born in a war zone or a peaceful city, a wealthy or poor home, South Korea or North Korea. The moment we erase all real conditions and interpret a person through calendar characters alone, we lose reality.
If you want to understand a person, look not at eight characters of birth but at the era, place, family, and society that made that person.
Buddhist Practice Is Questioning, Not Reciting Scripture
Reading scripture every day and reciting the Heart Sutra a thousand or ten thousand times does not automatically become practice. If one chants scripture like a spell without understanding its meaning, repeats only the form of sitting, and never questions what happens in one’s life, that is not study.
When encountering four pillars fortune-telling, asking “Is it really so, and what evidence exists?” is practice in daily life. If someone claims to follow the Buddha’s teaching but searches for personal fate after an accident and explains its cause through astrology, that person has turned away from dependent arising, impermanence, and non-self.
Asking properly and thinking critically are a Buddhist life and the practice of escaping present delusion.
Six Traffic Accidents and a Cause Sought in the Wrong Place
Monk Mungwang says that after suffering six traffic accidents in two years and even experiencing paralysis, he began studying four pillars fortune-telling. Because accidents happened whenever he went outside, he wondered why his fortune was this way and thought interpreting his eight characters would reveal the reason.
But an accident occurs when someone is on a road and driving, where many conditions meet, including another driver’s error and road conditions. Even when one does nothing wrong, another person’s mistake can cause a crash. Calling it “my fortune” turns every other car and surrounding condition into actors moving for my horoscope, a story of an inflated self.
The cause of a traffic accident must be sought not in the metal-overcomes-wood of a birth chart but in dependent conditions involving people, vehicles, roads, and actions.
The Fact That He Sought Four Pillars Because He Was Born in Korea
Even after the same misfortune, a person born where the concept of four pillars does not exist will not seek myeongri. Someone suffering accident or illness in Africa or South America would not open a Korean perpetual calendar to interpret eight characters.
The language and concepts in my mind were conveyed through my era and region, television and books, parents and people around me. To borrow Francis Bacon’s phrase, like an idol of the theater, we mistake an explanation already staged before us for the world itself.
The fact that four pillars came to mind is not evidence that it is true. It is evidence that I learned the concept within Korea’s cultural environment.
Reading Classics Does Not Turn a Claim into Scholarship
Monk Mungwang says he read Chinese classics such as Jeokcheonsu, Japyeongjinjeon, and Gungtongbogam in their original text and studied independently while listening to lectures. But reading old books in their original language does not guarantee that their contents are true.
The books disagree, and different readers interpret the same chart differently. There is no shared testing procedure, observational data, or standard for revision when a claim fails. The word “discipline” is not an ornament earned merely by having books and complicated terminology.
No matter how deeply one studies a collection of delusions, the delusion does not become a discipline.
The Arbitrariness of the Eight Characters and the Perpetual Calendar
Four pillars places the year, month, day, and hour of birth into four columns and assigns two characters to each, producing eight characters. It combines the ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches into the sixty-cycle and assigns them to year, month, day, and hour; a perpetual-calendar app displays them automatically for an entered birth time.
But why must a particular year be a gapja year and a particular day and hour receive a particular stem and branch? Was this arrangement built bottom-up by observing actual human lives, or does it merely continue a calendar system somebody once defined? Making the calculation elaborate without testing the origin and effect of its standard only hides an arbitrary starting point.
Accurate calculation of characters by an app does not make the premise connecting those characters to human fate accurate.
The Contradiction in Saying Destiny Is Fixed While Fortune Changes
Four pillars calls the unchangeable eight characters fixed at birth “destiny” and describes ten-year cycles and changes by year, month, and day as “fortune.” It then says fate is fixed, only to retreat by claiming that knowing the fortune allows one to be cautious and choose differently.
If it is fixed, it cannot be avoided; if choice can change it, it cannot be called fixed. Nor can the return of spring and summer be equated with events preassigned to an individual. Adding “the fortune was this way, but one can live differently” whenever a prediction fails lets every outcome be claimed as correct.
The claim that fate is fixed and the claim that one can know and change it cannot both be true.
The Inflated Self That Gives Humans a Special Fate
Humans regard themselves as special beings unlike ants underfoot, stones, water, or seeds. We imagine that humans alone must continue after death and even create a story in which a god made humans in its image. Read in reverse, humans projected themselves and made a humanlike god.
Imagining heavenly beings as beautiful, long-lived, and happy also projects what humans desire in the secular world onto heaven. Four pillars likewise imagines that the universe recorded the moment I was born and issued me a personal schedule.
The belief that humans alone receive a special destiny is not a law of the universe but a projection made by an inflated self.
Does a Dandelion Seed Have a Horoscope?
Where a dandelion seed lands, takes root, and flowers again is not fixed by the moment it emerged. The condition of the parent dandelion, soil and nutrients, wind and rain, human feet, and countless environmental conditions meet and change the result.
It may reach good soil, grow in a little dirt between steps, or be crushed before taking root. This change is not a fortune preassigned to the seed like fortune in one’s teens or twenties; it is dependent arising through relations and conditions. Humans are no different as part of nature.
Just as the moment of emergence does not determine the life of a dandelion seed, eight birth characters do not determine a human life.
Four Pillars Has Nothing to Do with Statistics
Defenders of four pillars often say that it rests on statistics accumulated over a long time. But statistics requires collecting and comparing actual cases and testing the possibility of error. Even accumulated observation of the kind in which many people experienced relief after taking maesil for an upset stomach is absent from the origin of four pillars.
Calling a year gapja and assigning properties of fire, water, or wood to characters did not result from studying countless births. A rule was imagined first, and people were fitted into it. Without samples, measurements, comparison groups, and failed cases, the word statistics does not apply.
Four pillars did not discover rules from data. It invented rules and then selected cases that looked like data.
From Tang Fortune-Telling to Ming and Qing Classics
Tang fortune-telling, introduced as an early form of four pillars, was divination from China’s Sui and Tang periods that centered fate on the year of birth and connected the twelve branches with stars in the sky. Later came systems such as Zi Wei Dou Shu and astrological schemes linking the five planets, sun, and moon, followed in the Ming and Qing periods by the classics read today.
Age is not proof of truth. Different authors added different systems in different eras, and even three representative classics do not converge on one interpretation. Astrology that arbitrarily connected stars with human life from the beginning simply accumulated more names and books.
The survival of Chinese divination books from centuries ago and the truth of their predictions about human destiny are entirely different questions.
Deduction from False Premises Cannot Produce an Answer
Four pillars first assigns qualities to yin-yang, the five elements, and the sixty-cycle, then tries to deduce a person’s personality and events from their combinations. But it cannot explain its basic premises: why a particular year must be gapja, or why the combination of in, sa, and sin must be ominous and produce punishment and killing.
Deduction guarantees a conclusion only when its premises are true and its rules clear. Logically combining properties assigned to characters without reason does not connect them to real people. The more complicated the calculation, the more deeply the original baseless agreement is hidden.
If the basic premise is a delusion, the elaborate interpretation built on it is also a delusion.
What Is Inborn Is Closer to Heredity and Environment Than Birth Time
If inborn traits exist, hereditary conditions from one’s parents are far more direct than the year, month, day, and hour of birth. I described my own family, in which my grandfather and earlier ancestors died young from liver problems and similar problems continued through my father, uncle, and cousins.
Personality and temperament are also shaped by parental traits, words heard and treatment received while growing up, friends and education, food and temperature, and social environment. What one might call later “fortune” also differs depending on whether one lives in Joseon or the age of artificial intelligence, a slave society or today’s society.
To understand what is inborn, look at DNA and family rather than calendar characters; to understand life’s course, look at era and society.
The Fantasy That the Same Fortune Returns Every Sixty Years
Seeing that the twelve branches repeat five times to make sixty, people imagined that years must also carry an identical sixty-year cycle. But the repetition of calendar names is different from the repetition of world events and individual lives with the same qualities.
Events such as the asteroid impact believed to have caused the extinction of dinosaurs did not occur according to a scheduled sixty-cycle. Wars and disasters, inventions and social changes do not repeat because of the qualities of calendar characters.
The sixty-cycle is a cycle of names, not evidence that the universe and human destiny repeat every sixty years.
Year, Month, Day, and Hour Have No Fixed Qualities
Monk Mungwang assigns qualities to each year, speaking of the energy of eulsa and what must be avoided. But even in the same March, cherry blossoms may be in full bloom in Busan while they have not opened in Seoul or farther north. March in one place also differs each year with climate and environment.
The Southern and Northern Hemispheres have opposite seasons in the same July. When one is in summer, the other is in winter, and polar day and polar night even change the cycle of light and darkness. During an ice age or after a massive asteroid impact, every month’s environment could be entirely unlike today.
Attaching one region’s familiar seasons to global time and then assigning human traits mistakes a concept for reality.
Do People with the Same Horoscope Live the Same Life?
With billions of people on Earth, countless people share the same year, month, day, and hour of birth. There is no evidence that they share temperament, occupation, wealth, accidents, and lifespan. Even identical twins with nearly the same DNA and birth time undergo different choices and events.
At the same moment, one person can be born in the Northern Hemisphere and another in the Southern Hemisphere, one in a wealthy country and another in a war zone. Even imagining conjoined twins, one of whom dies after separation while the other survives, immediately overturns the premise of a shared fate.
Each of the countless counterexamples in which the same chart fails to create the same destiny refutes the universal claim of four pillars.
The Boundary of “Being Born” Is Ambiguous from the Start
Four pillars treats the time a baby leaves the mother’s body as the moment destiny is fixed. But when a difficult labor lasts hours, which moment is birth: the emergence of the head, the whole body, or the first cry? For a child removed by scheduled cesarean section, who selected the destiny?
An egg does not suddenly arise from nothing the instant it fully leaves a hen. It is part of a continuous process that already existed inside the body, and we call one point “birth” for convenience. The phrase neither arising nor ceasing makes us examine how humans define the boundaries of arising and ceasing.
Birth time is a convenient boundary for records and daily life, not an absolute instant when the universe engraves a person’s fate.
The Fiction That 0.001 Second Changes the Entire Chart
There is almost no difference between a person born at 23:59:59.999 on December 31 and one born at 00:00:00.001 on January 1. Yet in the four pillars system, that tiny boundary can change every character for year, month, day, and hour.
Continuous reality contains no cliff, but the boxes of a human calendar create one. If time zones, calendars, and the historical decision to treat the Beginning of Spring as a new-year boundary differ, the same real moment can receive a different chart. A conceptual division is read as a sudden change in actual qualities.
The conclusion that human nature and lifelong fate change entirely within 0.001 second results from mistaking the concept of time for a substance.
Why a Horoscope Can Seem to Guess Personality
I also reject the claim that four pillars can guess temperament, personality, or career direction at least a little. When a baseless statement happens to fit, it is only a lucky accident, and people readily accept broadly applicable sentences as descriptions tailored precisely to themselves.
If it truly worked, other people with the same chart would show the same personality. Actual character is formed through heredity, parents’ speech, upbringing, friends, education, food, and countless experiences. Spending tens of millions of won on readings still yields no firmer information about a person than a calendar.
Four pillars cannot tell you your temperament, personality, or career. Do not mistake the feeling that something sounds plausible for evidence.
Gaslighting Extended into Compatibility and “Days Without Harm”
People deeply immersed in four pillars ask about marital compatibility and betrayal and search for “days without harm” when choosing dates for moving, marriage, and important events. The reality that people crowd dates shared by calendars and moving companies shows how deeply superstition is embedded in daily life and markets.
Claims that it is fortunate to bear a child in a golden-pig year or a red-snake year have the same structure. They attach colors and animal traits to a year and imagine blessings for a child born then. Long exposure to a baseless system makes it difficult even to recognize that one has been gaslighted.
Dates for marriage, moving, and childbirth can be chosen according to the real conditions of those involved. Calendar fortune neither protects nor harms a life.
The Essence of Buddhism Is Defeating Superstition through Questions
I criticize a monk more strongly for selling four pillars, prophecy, and feng shui because Buddhism should fundamentally be a path of wisdom that defeats such superstition. Do not believe a claim because it is traditional, a professor said it, it appeared in a book or on YouTube, or a famous monk pronounced it.
Fraud does not exist only in phishing calls. Through school and state, language and parents, books and religion, we can already be immersed in lies and delusions. We must ask whether a familiar concept exists in other regions and eras, who created it and for what purpose, and whether it can actually be verified.
Believe nothing merely because it is presented to you; ask, “Is it really so?” Wisdom sprouts when we question, and liberation from delusion begins.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.