Five Suggestions Associated With Choosing Auspicious Dates
It's a commonly heard practice among the older generations of Chinese to choose an auspicious courtship and marriage date and period to perform certain rituals for example bathing of a child during their first month of birth to mundane matters such as taking a road trip for what ever important or quasi-routine significance. The normally 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 most often 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 just good for certain events or matters and not well suited for others. This really is the little known caveat that majority of lay people are not aware of till today. Thus, a great understanding of its significance is very important whether or not it is safe to use it or otherwise. The 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 really is 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 there are actually strong Chinese Community who are still pro-Almanac referring ritual come from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and not to mention the dwindling appreciation in western-oriented Chinese in Singapore. If one were to compare their different editions, one will realize the variations in information provided therein. You will find often contradictions and misprint of information leading to more confusion and compromised on its quality and accuracy because of 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 the knowing when will be 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 also the beginning of spring where the Chinese celebrates the Lunar New Year.
Within the Chinese Almanac, you will find host of distinct methods printed therein for the readers to use. On the flip side, it may be very confusing if one do not understand the merits and demerits of each system presented therein.
To illustrate, there will be the 28 Constellations method. Even though it's useful for multiple purposes, it is 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 after that established the standard formula to calculate the division of time with their respective deviation over the course of the 28 constellations progression patterns. Alternatively, the great news is that such updates are conducted by NASA ( National Aero-Nautical Science Agency ) and give a five yearly review to ensure 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.
In modern times, people have introduced day-light saving time during summer period and then return to normal standard time in winter period. Additionally, the entire world are already split into 24 different time zones for standardization purpose or averaging the time within each time zone for convenience and ease of communication.
