A Flash of Purple-Red on the Face That Vanishes When You Turn Around: Illness or Fire Disaster? — Doctor Ni Haixia on Reading Disaster from Facial Colors and Avoiding Calamity with the Liu Ren Method

What patients search for: does a face suddenly turning red mean disaster / does a black face foretell sudden calamity / how do I avoid fire and car accidents / can finger-calculating really predict calamity / which direction should my head point when I sleep to avoid disaster / does sleeping direction determine boy or girl / which room should an unmarried daughter live in / which direction should retired grandparents live in

Corresponding themes (medical terms): the five elements and the heavenly stems and earthly branches · disaster colors and illness colors · the five colors governing illness · the five-element cycle of generation and overcoming · the Liu Ren method · avoiding and relocating disaster · the nine palaces of home positioning · Mountain over Water Meng and firm severity · technology versus science

Opening: starting from the five elements — how do the stems and branches match up?

Picking up from the previous lecture, Doctor Ni Haixia grounds the discussion in the most basic pairing of stems, branches and the five elements — to read disaster, you first have to understand how the heavenly stems and earthly branches relate to the five elements:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: First, of the twelve earthly branches grouped by element, you need to know: hai and zi belong to water. Then you need to know the positions of the heavenly stems — jia and yi are wood, bing and ding are fire, wu and ji are earth, geng and xin are metal, ren and gui are water. That is wood, fire, earth, metal, water.

He gives a practical scene: one day in the office, you turn — not face to face, but in the instant when he turns away, you look back, and he turns around — you catch his complexion:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: The color is purple-red, a vivid red like the glow of fire, and then after a moment it is gone, you cannot see it anymore — this person is marked for a fire disaster, he will be burned to death. If you keep seeing red steadily, that is heart trouble; if you see green, on the other hand, that person is doing very well.

The Chang Gung Hospital burn patient: every ward he was moved to caught fire

At this point Doctor Ni Haixia tells a true case that makes your hair stand on end — Chang Gung Hospital once received an emergency patient from a fire:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Naturally, they followed procedure, dressed his wounds and put him in the intensive care unit. After he was placed there, the ICU area began to catch fire; they moved him out, moved him to another place, and that place caught fire again — in the end he was still burned to death. The people involved told me at the time: how do you explain that wherever the patient was moved, fire broke out, and in the end he burned to death? When a person carries disaster, this is how it runs — you cannot dodge it. You ask: isn’t this science? — It is not science, it is technology. Chinese philosophy is the true science, and everything can be explained within science.

How to judge the course of an illness? Watch the five-element cycle

So how do disaster and complexion correspond? Doctor Ni Haixia returns to the framework of the five-element cycle of generation and overcoming to teach the rise and fall of an illness:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: By the five-element cycle, when a fire illness meets a fire hour, does the illness qi not rise? When it reaches an earth hour, that is when the illness turns toward recovery; at a metal hour it is threatened; and when it reaches a water hour — water overcomes fire — that is death. So when fire occurs, meeting the fire position or the water position is the most ominous of all. This is not about picking an hour — it is about picking a day. Say today you see a person’s face as vivid as fire, gone the moment he turns: disaster, this person will have a fire calamity. You hurry to the almanac and check the nearest future day whose day stem is ren or gui, and whose earthly branch is hai or zi — the liver is water, the branch is water too, so that day is a water day. The disaster occurs on that water day.

Finger-calculating: that gesture of Zhuge Liang’s is the Liu Ren method

The day is known — how do you calculate the hour? Doctor Ni Haixia says: we have a calculating tool, in the almanac, called the Liu Ren method:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Most people glance at the almanac and that’s the end of it — the Liu Ren method, whatever that is, they don’t know what it means. The Liu Ren method is our tool for calculating when a disaster star strikes. You hold up three fingers like this and count with your thumb — this is how Zhuge Liang did it: sitting on his warhorse, he’d sit there calculating on his fingers — no, can’t do it… advance the army! Zhuge Liang’s famous finger-calculating is exactly this.

He also reminds us: back when we discussed the Ling Gui Ba Fa (Eight Methods of the Spirit Turtle), we used the day’s stems and branches to calculate — this whole system is connected. The method of calculation: start from the month, then count up the day, then count up the hour. He gives an example:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Say the day is gui hai, the twelfth of the third lunar month. In the third month, chen is established; start counting the day from the same place: twelve — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve; then start counting the hour from the same place: zi, chou, yin, mao, chen… kong wang (the Void) — seven to nine in the morning, and there it is.

So that morning from seven to nine is the disaster hour. If nothing happens, the hour cycles — kong wang appears twice in a day, and from seven to nine in the evening it appears again.

How to avoid a fire on a water day? Stay near cold water, turn off the water heater

Once the hour is calculated, how do you avoid it? Doctor Ni Haixia says a water-day fire is avoided with water:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When the hour arrives, I don’t care whether you sit in the bathtub or in the bathroom. But here’s the funny thing — if the water you run is hot, scalding to death is still a fire death! You meant to keep him out of the disaster, and instead you’ve helped it along: a fire disaster kills by heat — burning is heat, scalding is heat too. So you must do everything possible to let him avoid the calamity — stay near cold water, absolutely no hot water; or simply turn off all the heat, take away everything that can get hot. And one more point: when the disaster arrives and it doesn’t happen, he will feel uneasy in his heart, his heart will be flustered — only that disaster makes him content. When there is no disaster, he feels everything is wrong — that is actually the normal, healthy state.

He also mentions the metaphysical way of avoidance: take him into the mountains and sit him in a stream — and a forest fire happens to break out right there. This person carries fire disaster; wherever the disaster goes, it follows him. Some people with the heavenly eye can see that a fire disaster is a little child, all red, who at night leaps onto someone’s rooftop — and that house begins to burn.

Avoiding disaster in the home: find the life gate among the sixty-four hexagrams

Besides behavioral avoidance, there is also home-based avoidance. Doctor Ni Haixia asks everyone to look at the sixty-four hexagrams written in his book (Tian Ji — Records of Heaven’s Mandate):

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Some hexagrams are auspicious and can turn misfortune into good fortune. Say you are fire, a rebellious daughter, and now there is a fire disaster — the Water over Fire Ji Ji hexagram is good; the Fire over Water Wei Ji hexagram is calamity. Heaven is fair to everyone: once your destiny is set, whether you are unmarried, a son, or a married husband, there are eight positions in the home, and one of them is a place of escape reserved for you.

Later he mentions the Qi Men Dun Jia (Strange Gate Escape) system, with its xiu (rest), shang (injury), sheng (life), si (death), jing (scenery) gates and the rest — in fact these are all calculated from the eight trigrams. He gives examples by trigram position:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: You are qian (the father), and red appears on your body — Tian Huo Tong Ren (Heaven with Fire, Fellowship with Men): there is fire above heaven, and you still run toward the fire — not good. If the father sits in the north, it is Tian Shui Song (Heaven and Water, Conflict) — maybe your house catches fire and burns someone else’s, and they sue you. If he sits on thunder, Tian Lei Wu Wang (Heaven with Thunder, Innocence) — an undeserved calamity is also not good. Sitting on the Pi hexagram is worse — you will definitely be burned. Tian Ze Lu (Heaven over Lake, the Wanderer) — what happens sitting on the Lu position? Tian Feng Gou (Heaven and Wind, Encounter) — a fire meeting wind: wind feeds the fire, and the fire grows stronger. So what to do? Tian Shan Dun (Mountain over Heaven, Retreat) — the northeast corner: there you can run, there you can retreat.

Changing positions: move the car accident from three in the afternoon to three in the morning

Doctor Ni Haixia says the repositioning trick can shift the time of a disaster entirely — someone had a car accident fated for three to five in the afternoon, and after the repositioning it became three to five in the morning:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: From three to five in the morning, there are no cars on the road — if you still get hit and killed then, you really were meant to die! What are you doing outside at three in the morning? We fix the position, shift the disaster to the middle of the night, you don’t go out at night, and the disaster is avoided. But there are many ways to dissolve disaster — you must think it through carefully; there is no fixed rule — adapt to the time and the place, and use your wisdom. You must not calculate it perfectly and then deliver him straight into the fire — no, absolutely not! If there is fire at this moment, and you raise your voice, light a fire, and the wind blows it onto him and he burns to death, it is all your doing — there was no fire before, and you caused it.

How specifically do you change a fire disaster? He explains in detail:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: For a fire disaster, we take only the water direction — the direction must be north. Sleep with your feet toward the north: lying this way, feet north, head south. With your feet pointing north, when you sit up your face happens to face north — that is the water position. The disaster that was fated for the middle of the night now comes in the daytime — in the daytime everyone can see it, so nothing happens; the time naturally adjusts itself.

Black rules water and sudden calamity: earth overcomes water, seek an earth day and an earth hour

Red is fire disaster — what about black? Doctor Ni Haixia continues:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: You see a person whose face is black — disaster! There is an accident, a sudden calamity! This calamity is light enough to injure the body, heavy enough to take the life. What to do? Black is water, and earth can overcome water. First, calculate which day the car accident will happen: the day stem is wu or ji, the branch is chen, xu, chou or wei — that is an earth day; then check the lunar month and date by the earth day, and use the Xiao Liu Ren (Xiao Ji, Kong Wang, Da An, Liu Lian, Su Xi, Chi Kou) to find the hour — where kong wang (the Void) falls is the hour.

Once the hour is found, repositioning can change it too: look at the eight positions of the home — east, southeast, southwest, west, northwest, northeast, north — and then the twelve palaces, dividing the three hundred sixty degrees of heaven and earth into twelve angles:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: We turn the position toward where the feet point — feet toward the chou position (about thirty degrees past north). Sudden calamities mostly occur in the daytime, and we want to move it to the middle of the night, so chou hour (one to three in the morning) becomes our place to open the life gate. The disaster fated for the afternoon moves to the evening, or to the middle of the night.

The Yonghe woman’s dream: her leg broken by a hit-and-run — the dream played it out first

Doctor Ni Haixia tells a case he handled personally, proving that “changing positions” is not empty talk — a young woman in Yonghe:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: I told her how to change her disaster. She said: those people really told the truth. One morning she woke up feeling very, very tired and really didn’t want to go to work — but her watch said six o’clock. Her boss treated her very well, and she felt too embarrassed to skip work — and it was because she had woken from a dream: she dreamed she walked out of her front door, reached the mouth of the alley and was hit by a motorcycle; after she was knocked down, she crawled out from under the bike and woke with a start — she looked at her watch: six o’clock, just as it had happened. She said she hadn’t wanted to go, but then she thought of how kind her boss was, so she went out anyway — and at the mouth of the alley it happened on the spot! What she had just done in her dream happened on the spot, because seven o’clock had not yet passed. That day she had her accident, crawled out from under the vehicle, and her leg was broken. She had dreamed only half of it before — the other half of the time had not yet passed; it had to get past seven o’clock. She said if she had known, she would have waited until after seven to go out, and nothing would have happened.

Doctor Ni Haixia concludes: if you change the position to the overcoming position according to the overcoming cycle, the time conversion does not happen. He also takes a swipe at the talisman-and-incantation school:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: There are many forms of avoiding misfortune. In the past some people drew talismans and practiced incantations, some attributed everything to spirits of the dead — I don’t think any of that is very good. We have always been able to use the facts of heaven and earth, the generation and overcoming of yin and yang and the five elements, the heavenly stems and earthly branches, to calculate exactly what is going on — that is our way of avoiding disaster.

The rules for reading disaster: it manifests within two weeks of a solar term — and after repositioning, wait two weeks

So how do you verify whether the disaster has passed? Doctor Ni Haixia gives two time points:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When disaster qi strikes, it always comes within two weeks of a solar term. After you change it — because you don’t know when the color first appeared at its faintest; you might see it on day one, or you might see it on day five or day ten — the safest thing is to wait until two weeks have passed. Once the disaster zone is gone and nothing happens, the calamity has been avoided. An illness color persists; a disaster color is seen in a blurred, instantaneous moment — you see it from an unexpected angle; face to face you cannot see it, it always appears in the instant of turning around or looking back. So the best phrase is “in a blur of a moment” — that is the most accurate. Otherwise you would have to turn off the lights and practice reading qi and color — watching with your eyes; long gazing injures the liver, so gaze upward instead.

The nine-palace case: the farmer in the courtyard house, whose three daughters each married an excellent husband

Next comes the practical application of the nine palaces of the home. Doctor Ni Haixia says every household’s situation is different — he once met a farmer who had never studied, but whose head was perfectly clear:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: He lived in a courtyard house and had three daughters. At first the couple lived in the northwest corner; the eldest daughter lived here, the second here, the third here. One day he modified the courtyard a little — the middle was empty, and where the kitchen had been, he moved the eldest daughter in; for some reason the kitchen was moved back, as if he wanted to clear the space for a grain-drying yard, to make it bigger. The eldest daughter had been there less than a year when she married an excellent husband. The old man then had his second daughter move in — a year later, she too married an excellent husband; then he had the third daughter move in — she too married an excellent husband. With nothing to do after the harvest, the farmer could actually observe it: strange — my eldest daughter used to live here, chattering all day like her mother, noisier than my wife — and she hurried up and got married. She originally lived here — the mother’s position was good; when the second daughter moved in she followed the same pattern — her head had no obstacles, she was born to marry. But if you rent wrong: the third daughter takes the eldest’s position… the younger sister lives in the southeast corner, the elder sister lives in the southwest corner — the younger marries, the elder still doesn’t!

And a wrong position sets off a chain reaction: as for the father — there are two women serving in the house, the mother and the eldest daughter fighting over who washes the clothes, fighting over who cooks. The father says he’s fine, but the father is miserable:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: I only said the women married. And the household especially loves cooking, washing and doing dishes — when they see a man, they don’t like him — because she doesn’t like people her own age; her age keeps growing, at thirty she has the thoughts of a forty- or fifty-year-old, so she likes men who are already married. As for the younger sister — silly and naive, she ran off to the southeast corner, and so she married. So if a girl wants to marry, to settle down, to meet an excellent husband — the southeast corner is the best place to live.

How to arrange a three-generation household? The retired grandparents move to the northeast corner

Next comes the three-generation case. Doctor Ni Haixia draws a diagram: the kitchen is on the east, a room on the north… however they arranged it, nothing was right:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: The grandparents are old; they should be retired — but they say “retired” with their mouths, they are retired in form, but their spirit has not retired: they still occupy the parents’ position, they still want to manage everyone’s business. When the father is disciplining his son, the grandfather goes and hits the father: you dare hit my grandson, I’ll hit you — and it breaks into a quarrel! Retired people should retreat to the retirement position — move to the northeast corner; the northeast corner is the Dun hexagram position, Mountain over Heaven, for the grandparents. Now look at the eldest daughter: sitting in the son’s position — she doesn’t marry! Her natal hexagram is Xun as Wind. At this point, of course, she must return to her place: the eldest daughter returns, returns to the parents’ position; the working, earning parents are given the northwest corner; the son doesn’t move — in the whole house, only the son is in the right place. When name and position match, his fame, studies, examinations, marriage and health all advance together.

When name and position do not match, it depends on how they fail to match — there is excess and there is deficiency — this is the principle that too much is as bad as too little:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When heaven and earth set their positions, they set the so-called doctrine of the mean, the balanced position, in a good position. Today people have lost their spirit; only the form remains — so when you look at a house and buy it: the master bedroom is the big room, the parents go there, and the other children each pick — and what each one picks follows destiny. As a result we see a girl who doesn’t marry; one look at her home and she lives in the mother’s position — one radish, one hole. Then look at a boy, all yin stars inside — you know he is gay, just from where he sleeps. Then look at the parents: this couple — the wife will dominate the husband, the wife’s qi field is very strong — now she lives in the master bedroom — that is destiny written. So people are funny: you don’t understand astronomy and geography, you walk into a house and say: oh, I love this one! You look at many, you don’t want any, I must have this one — you move in, and arranged according to the original positions, that is your destiny. From now on you watch: whatever destiny a person has, that is the house he lives in. But fortune is in our hands — fortune can change a person’s marriage. Beyond ruler and minister, father and son, there is also the power of human effort, which enters to solve the problems of illness — that is the limit of what we can already achieve.

Boy or girl can also be arranged by position

That limit even includes boys and girls:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Later, if you learn the classical formulas, getting her pregnant is simple. If we didn’t know geography, we would use medicine to make the patient pregnant — because we all prescribe yang-tonifying herbs, classical formula doctors prescribe yang herbs, so after the patient conceives, most of the babies are boys. If we want her to have a girl — of course we can: move her, and she has a girl! Let her live in the yin position and she gives birth to a girl: the first, second and third yao are all yin, and then what is born is a girl.

So if medicine also studies astronomy and geography, and you know the disaster positions for courting fortune and avoiding misfortune — all these calamities can be dissolved. And those who won’t listen — that is their destiny; so be it:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: When you help people, never say it a second time. If he asks you to say it again, it means he didn’t believe you the first time, he will forget it — when a second telling is needed, it means he has already stopped believing you, and saying it again no longer matters; you can no longer convince him.

Mountain over Water Meng: wisdom sealed shut, awakening requires “firm severity”

He closes by citing the Meng hexagram of the I Ching — Mountain over Water, water under the mountain:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Mountain over Water Meng — water under the mountain, the mountain mist shrouding everything: this represents a person whose wisdom cannot open. So the way of awakening is to enlighten; the way of enlightenment requires firm severity — it must be firm severity. Firm severity is one sentence, and that is the principle — it must be strong. Only strength can persuade people. There was a mother and a daughter; the mother was hospitalized, no other relatives were there, only these two. What to do? I said: I’ll make the decision for you — if you stay here, you die! She moved at once, checked out at once — this is called firm severity. There is absolutely no way to say “your illness is not good, it will end this way, you need this surgery” — you talk all day and she won’t listen. “If you stay here, you die” — that said, the two of them moved out and left the hospital immediately. Now they are fine — they have fully recovered, and went home happy.

So what he writes on his web page is “firm severity” — it is the awakening:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: Scold you and you still won’t listen — you’re hopeless. Talk to you gently, and you absolutely won’t listen — we all say Chinese medicine is very good, oh, Western medicine is useless, and after you say it, it’s completely useless. That’s how it is all over the world. Don’t mistake technology for science — science and technology are not the same thing; this is the true principle between heaven and earth.

Closing: friends in the southern hemisphere — north and south are reversed

Finally, Doctor Ni Haixia specifically cautions listeners overseas — especially viewers in the southern hemisphere:

💬 Note from Doctor Ni Haixia: If you live in the southern hemisphere, the east-west positioning is the same; north and south must be swapped. Everything else is the same. So if you live in the southern hemisphere and you live in the south… it’s the daughter living in the north — friends in Australia and New Zealand, if you watch this DVD, don’t get it wrong: you say teacher, you’re wrong — I’m not wrong. With north and south reversed: the husband zone in the southern hemisphere is the southwest; in the northern hemisphere the husband zone is the northwest — north and south reversed becomes northeast and southwest, that is the southern hemisphere.

He adds one final remark: so when it rains, you look… or you’re at home, and you know where this system applies and where it needs to be swapped.

Compiled from Doctor Ni Haixia’s Ren Ji (Human Records) lecture series on the Huang Di Nei Jing (Seventy-Eighth Lecture)