Target line (Yong Shen)

Once the chart is out, the next step is choosing the Target line; remember that it is always by focusing on the Target line that one knows whether the matter will succeed.

How the Target line corresponds to the matter to be read

Six Relations	Matter to be read
Siblings	Siblings by blood, the relationship; if asking about doing business together among siblings in the family, Siblings is the Target line
Offspring	Children and grandchildren, their health, medicines, the skill of someone in the medical profession
Wealth	A man asking about love and marriage, a wife's health, money, subordinates, jewellery
Officer	A woman asking about love and marriage, career, an illness, a man's health, applying for a job for someone in the police or the army
Parents	Parents' health, housing, papers and interviews, vehicles

More on choosing the Target line

• In the past the nine trades took Wealth as the Target line; today work such as trading, domestic help, manual trades, waiting tables — in general work that is not desk work and has no road of promotion — takes Wealth as the Target line, and applying for extra work or part-time work is also read through Wealth.
• For applying for a job, Parents is the Target line, not Officer as in the past. In the old days the Officer line was valued because it was a feudal regime: to rise was to become a mandarin, there was no other road. Today it is different — an interview is a matter of papers, so take Parents.
• Vehicles, clothes and dishes take Parents.
• Phones, tablets, phone chargers… take Wealth.
• A husband's siblings take Siblings, parents-in-law take Parents; do not reason loosely on your own, saying for instance that the husband's parents gave birth to the husband so we take Wealth as the Target line — that is wrong.
• Someone studying Zi Wei or the Four Pillars takes Parents; Parents Prosperous means a good teacher. But Offspring on the Self line with Parents moving is trouble brought by the work, nothing good, so be careful; judge the particular matter by the branch, the element, the Six Spirits and inner and outer, and with enough merit one can rely on that to avoid it.
• Someone close to the spirits of the dead, asking help of them, praying to deities or being possessed, needs the Officer line; Officer Prosperous is good for the one who prays to deities, Weak favours the one who is close to ghosts.
• A yin-yang Feng Shui master also takes a different Target line, but I have not met many such cases; I will speak of it later, with more experience.
• Someone practising medicine needs two hexagrams. Asking about their own skill, Offspring is the Target line. Asking about the road of promotion, Officer and Parents cannot be left out.
• A monk or a ritual master takes Offspring. Usually the year and month of taking refuge answer to Offspring (timing).
• Someone with the Officer line on the Self line easily comes into contact with the spirits of the dead, and the Weaker it is the more they attract them — this has been seen many times.
• For illness, the root cause and the symptoms must certainly be read through the Officer line, but one must adapt: in a hexagram where the Officer line does not move and is not on the Self line, it is not read that way. If the Self line is Weak and broken down, the illness is right there; judge it by the Five Elements, and sometimes combine it with the Six Spirits for more data with which to treat it. The way of treating is set out clearly in another book.

Siblings and friends

Remember absolutely: only siblings take Siblings; for sworn brothers by word of mouth the Target line is the Response line, and once papers are drawn up it becomes Siblings again.

Friends are the Response line, not Siblings; please do not confuse them.

Only where blood is shared do we use the Six Relations; it is not that everything is the Response line.

The Response line reports many things, and a beginner should not pay attention to them, to avoid the mistakes that bring harm on themselves.

Housing

A house takes Parents. But if the question is what living there is like, take the Self line to know whether it is comfortable, and take Parents for the build quality of the house.

To examine the present Feng Shui of a house, take all six lines. Note that Feng Shui and the Yi are categories of their own: this then includes an overall reading of the house to find where the fault lies, after which one goes into the specific repair of that fault by casting each hexagram by hand.

Helping someone else with their own matter

When helping someone else with their own matter, we take only that person's own Target line to decide good or ill fortune, and not the Target line of the matter.

Example: asking about a child's examination, we take Offspring as the sole Target line to decide success or failure; there is no need to read Parents.

The Five Roles (Wu Shen)

The Five Roles are the Target line and the four satellites around it, namely the Source line, the Opposing line, the Draining line and the Hostile line, with relations of generation and control as follows:

• The Source line generates the Target line
• The Opposing line controls the Target line
• The Draining line drains the Target line, that is, the Target line generates the Draining line
• The Hostile line controls the Source line of the Target line

See also

• Self line — the Self and Target relation
• Six Relations, Response line
• Source line, Opposing line, Draining line, Hostile line
• Strength, Hidden line — when the hexagram has no Target line
• Career, Principles of reading a hexagram