Chinese Numerology: Luoshu and Lucky Numbers

What is Chinese numerology?

Chinese numerology is not a single method but three layers of number lore that have grown together over two and a half thousand years. The first is cosmological: the diagrams called Hetu and Luoshu assign the numbers 1 to 10 to the five elements, the directions and the seasons, and the Luoshu magic square underlies feng shui to this day. The second is phonetic: in Mandarin and Cantonese many numbers sound like other words, so 8 sounds like prosperity and 4 like death, and this shapes prices, addresses and wedding dates across East Asia. The third is divinatory: the I Ching reads situations through 64 hexagrams built from broken and unbroken lines, and the Four Pillars read a birth through the sexagenary cycle of stems and branches. None of these reduces a birth date or a name to a single digit; the Chinese name numerology that does so, by counting strokes, is a Japanese invention of the 1920s. This page sets out each layer with its real sources, its tables and its limits.

• Three layers: cosmological diagrams, lucky sounds, divinatory systems; no single-digit reduction.
• The Luoshu square, with every line summing to 15, is the grid behind the bagua and feng shui.
• 8 is lucky because it sounds like to prosper; 4 is avoided because it sounds like death.
• Stroke-count name numerology is modern and came from Japan in 1929.

Hetu and Luoshu: the numbers of heaven and earth

Two diagrams carry the Chinese theory of number. The Hetu, the River Chart, pairs each element with a generating number from 1 to 5 and a completing number from 6 to 10: water 1 and 6, fire 2 and 7, wood 3 and 8, metal 4 and 9, earth 5 and 10. Odd numbers belong to heaven and yang, even numbers to earth and yin. The Luoshu, the Luo Writing, arranges 1 to 9 in a square in which every row, column and diagonal adds up to 15. Legend says a turtle carried it out of the Luo river to Yu the Great; the oldest clear description of the arrangement is in texts of the Han dynasty, around the 1st century CE, where it serves as the plan of the Mingtang, the ritual hall of the emperor. Odd, yang numbers occupy the centre and the four cardinal points; even, yin numbers occupy the corners.

The bagua: eight trigrams, eight numbers, eight directions

A trigram is a stack of three lines, each either unbroken, yang, or broken, yin; there are eight possible stacks, the bagua. In the arrangement called Later Heaven, attributed to King Wen of Zhou, each trigram sits on one square of the Luoshu and takes its number and its direction. This is the grid that feng shui lays over a floor plan: the south is Li, fire, 9; the north is Kan, water, 1; the south-east is Xun, wind, 4, the sector of wealth; the north-east is Gen, mountain, 8, the sector of knowledge. The eight trigrams also stand for a family, father and mother and three sons and three daughters, and for parts of the body, animals and qualities, which is how a diagram of lines became a complete language of correspondences.

• The centre, 5, has no trigram: it is the pivot, the earth element.
• Pair any two trigrams and you get one of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching.
• The Later Heaven arrangement is the one used in feng shui; the Earlier Heaven arrangement is cosmological.

Lucky and unlucky numbers: a numerology of sounds

The best known part of Chinese numerology has nothing to do with calculation. Chinese has few syllables and many homophones, so a number spoken aloud evokes another word. Eight, ba in Mandarin and baat in Cantonese, resembles fa or faat, to prosper; the association is strongest in Cantonese, which is why it spread from Hong Kong and Guangdong. Four, si, sounds like death, si with a different tone, and buildings across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan skip the fourth floor as Western buildings skip the thirteenth. These preferences have a measurable price: flats on the eighth and eighteenth floors sell at a premium, number plates and phone numbers full of eights are auctioned for large sums, and the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics began on 8 August 2008 at eight minutes past eight in the evening.

The I Ching: sixty-four hexagrams and the oldest binary code

The I Ching, the Book of Changes, is a manual of divination whose core, the sixty-four hexagrams with their short oracle texts, was composed in the Western Zhou period, around the 9th century BCE; the philosophical commentaries called the Ten Wings were added in the Warring States and Han periods. A hexagram is two trigrams stacked, six lines each broken or unbroken, and the sixty-four hexagrams are exactly the sixty-four possible arrangements. Consultation traditionally used fifty yarrow stalks, later three coins, to generate each line with a probability that favours unchanging lines. In 1703 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, having received a diagram of the hexagrams from the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet, recognised in them the binary numbers 0 to 63 that he had just described, and said so in print; the I Ching thus became the first ancient text read as a binary system.

The Four Pillars: a birth written in sixty signs

The Chinese reading of a birth date, bazi, the eight characters, does not add digits. It writes the year, month, day and hour of birth in the sexagenary cycle, a cycle of sixty combinations formed by pairing ten heavenly stems with twelve earthly branches, the same branches that carry the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac. Each pillar is one stem and one branch, so a birth is eight characters, and each character has an element and a polarity. The reading looks at the balance of the five elements among the eight characters, at the relationship of each to the day stem, which represents the person, and at the ten-year luck periods that follow. It is an astrology of cycles, far closer to the vedic dasha system than to any digit reduction, and it has been practised in its present form since the Song dynasty.

• Sixty years make one full cycle; a sixtieth birthday is a return to one’s birth sign.
• The day stem, not the year animal, represents the person in a serious reading.
• Shao Yong, in the 11th century, built a cosmology on the numbers of the I Ching that still shapes this art.

Name numerology by strokes, and how to use all this today

A method that does reduce a name to numbers exists in the Chinese world: it counts the strokes of the characters of a name, combines the totals into five figures and reads each against a list of eighty-one meanings. It is popular in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan, but it is not ancient. It was devised by the Japanese author Kumasaki Kenō and published in 1929, then imported into Chinese-speaking regions, where it is still used to choose or change a name. Knowing this helps you read Chinese numerology honestly: the deep layer, the Hetu, the Luoshu and the trigrams, is a cosmology of balance; the everyday layer, lucky sounds, is a social code; and the systems that read a person, the Four Pillars and the I Ching, are arts of timing and situation, not of fixed character.

• Stroke-count name numerology: Japan, 1929, eighty-one meanings.
• The Luoshu is the one key that opens every feng shui diagram.
• No Chinese system reduces a date or a name to a single digit.