Book Review 1: Chinese Metaphysical Compendium

Silly as it may seem, but as soon as we had a store that made ordering from other countries easy where I live this was in the first batch of books I bought.  Also seems a worthy first book to start the review blog I mentioned a while ago about.

First have to clear out that this is Reference book, the idea is we know how to use the tables and calculations in it. If we don't know how to use the stuff in practice there are wonderful facebook videos from Joey Yap and his many students explaining in details different approaches and ideas and of course many other Five Arts practitioners in all sorts of formats and mediums all around the webs one may enjoy. I personally find Kevin Chan material very clear and useful, so for using any of this in practice aiming at that is good. Of course there are also courses and stuff, in the academy and other places..

Yet the base framework of it all is in here and its very, very pretty and useful, at least in my humble view.

Its very big book, it covers Bazi, Feng Shui, I Ching/Yi Jing and more. We have the basic relations of stuff, like Stems and Branches, 10 gods to family members, Pillars etc.It has some stuff I didn't knew it had, like Symbolic Stars together with description. It also has Palm Reading, something rare to see in English from Five Arts point of view. Also a little about Face Reading.

 We can actually view what it contains and parts of it in Google books, so doesn't seem needed to go that deep into the details of that. And again, this is reference material, so there is little text, most is tables and relations.

I always viewed buying a book similar to eating. We choose carefully what we want to include in our path/domain and considering that almost all expensive books I buy, I'm usually very clear what they will contain. In this case... This is something that a serious Five Arts practitioner should have, if they can afford it, in my humble view. Its soo pretty and it makes very easy to access all these calculations that, of course, we often use in calculators, but I find myself very often in need to revisit something there and looking at this book is much better then searching the webs..

 

So I think this is the summary for me. 

*Very pretty, worth having even just for that. 

*Includes much of the important calculations and relations around the Five Arts that Five Arts enthusiasts or serious practitioners may find themselves using.

*As far as the information in it goes, its again something worth having for someone interested in the Arts.

*Its reference material, so don't be disappointed if there isn't much text explaining how to use, there are other mediums for that out there.


I think this is it. As I aim to make reviews only of books that I think are very good, most of the reviews will likely be overly positive. This seems the right way to do it, though, this worked for me, I'm sharing what works for me, what didn't work for me, may work for someone else, so no point writing about it much. 

There may be exceptions with that, for example in Benson Yeo material someday, where there is good stuff, but also some stuff that I'm not sure where to place. So won't all be positive, but for the compendium, there is nothing negative I can think of, but again, one can check what it contains early on, so they know what they will get if they decide to buy it. That being said, I knew what I'm getting and I'm very, very happy with it. : )

 

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