3 Must Have Resources For Auspicious Weddings
It is a commonly heard practice among-the older generations of Chinese to choose an auspicious date and period to perform certain rituals such as bathing of a child during their first month of birth to mundane matters such as taking a road trip for whatever important or quasi-routine significance. The most commonly available resource or tool is that of the Chinese Almanac or Tong Shu which the Cantonese-speaking readers preferably called it "Tong Sheng" (literally translated as Total Victory.)
For the illiterate of the past, the normally adopted approach could be to pick the Red print text printed therein as "safe date" to use and avoid the Black print text therein. However,this quick and dirty method is severely flawed and that Red print text dates are only good for certain events or matters and not ideal for others. This is the little known caveat that majority of lay people are not aware of till today. Thus, a great knowledge of its significance is important whether or not it is safe to use it or else. The exact same analogy applies to Black print text dates.
I have come across Red print text dates used by my friends and clients experienced unfavourable outcome and the damage is life-long until today. The rest is history now. It's meaningless to elaborate on it. But a big lesson learned for them and then for me personally.
The commonly available Chinese Almanac typically produced in areas where you can find strong Chinese Community who are still pro-Almanac referring ritual come from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and and of course the dwindling appreciation in western-oriented Chinese in Singapore. If one were to compare their different editions, you will realize the variations in information provided therein. You will discover often contradictions and misprint of information leading to more confusion and compromised on its quality and accuracy due to its low-cost of producing it simply by following the age-old formula faithfully since it was made available from the imperial palace to the common people then who were largely farmers-oriented population.
These commoners and farmers used it then to identify when were the changing 24 sub-seasons and for example when to harvest such as set the auspicious date knowing when are the different dates of Chinese oriented festivals and remembrance days for example Tomb-Sweeping day, Dumpling festival, Mid-Autumn festival, arrival of summer solstice, winter solstice and the beginning of spring where the Chinese celebrates the Lunar New Year.
In the Chinese Almanac, you can find host of different methods printed therein for the readers to use. However, it may be very confusing if one don't understand the merits and demerits of each system presented therein.
To illustrate, there is the 28 Constellations method. Even though it is useful for multiple purposes, it's outdated as it had not been calibrated to reflect the shifting axis of the earth revolution around the sun since it was first observed and then established the conventional formula to calculate the division of time with their respective deviation over the course of the 28 constellations progression patterns. On the other hand, the good news is that such updates are conducted by NASA ( National Aero-Nautical Science Agency ) and supply a five yearly review to make certain that all the navigational and communication are synchronized to compensated for the shifting axis of Earth revolution relative to the Sun position. This planetarium updates are available from NASA but one has to incorporate it in to the calculation methodology to get true local time.
Nowadays, individuals have introduced day-light saving time during summer period and after that return to normal standard time in winter period. Moreover, the whole world are already separated into 24 different time zones for standardization purpose or averaging the time within each time zone for convenience and ease of communication.
