Chinese Fortune Sticks draw one of Guanyin's hundred sticks

The order matters more than the equipment. At the altar you introduce yourself first, name, birth date and where you live, the way Xingtian Temple in Taipei asks of anyone putting a question to a god, and then you state one matter, not three. BW Monastery in Singapore, which runs these Guanyin draws every day, puts it plainly: one question per lot, and as specific as you can make it.

Then the cup. You kneel or stand, tilt it forward and shake until one stick works its way out; the Donghai temple in Taitung asks you not to shake too hard. The stick is not yours yet. You lay it down and throw the two moon blocks. One flat side up and one round side up is a holy cup, and the stick is confirmed. Both flat is a laughing cup, which Donghai treats as a reason to throw again, and both round is an angry cup, which sends the stick back to the cup. The Mazu temple at Lukang is stricter and sends you back to the cup on a laugh as well. Only after the blocks agree do you take the number to the counter for the printed verse. If you want the blocks on their own, for a plain yes or no, the yes or no oracle throws them three times the way a careful temple does.

Here is something the sites that print these verses rarely mention: there is no single official text. The Guanyin set has been copied from temple to temple and printed by many hands, and the copies drift. We took two published editions of the hundred verses and compared them line by line. Only 3 of the 100 verses matched exactly. Of the 400 lines, 115 matched character for character. And 24 sticks had a different grade, with one edition using a fourth, "two-sided" grade the other does not have at all.

The drift is rarely in the picture. The second verse is a carp in one book and a whale in the other, but both are waiting in the river for their moment; the ninety-ninth is a reckless rider and a house on fire in both, in different words. So the meaning of a stick survives the copying better than its wording does. The verses on this page follow the edition used by a working Guanyin temple, BW Monastery in Singapore, which also matched a third copy we checked; every English line is our own.

Drawing a numbered lot and reading a verse is old. One of the earliest known sets is the Tianzhu lingqian, literally the numinous lots of India, from the Southern Song dynasty (1127 to 1279). Its verses crossed to Japan and still stand behind the hundred-verse fortunes sold at temples there as omikuji. The Guanyin set used in Chinese temples today is a different book, of seven-character verses, and no source we could check records who first compiled it or when.

Why Guanyin? Because in Chinese folk practice she is the default: the figure on the shelf in the restaurant and the taxi, the one people turn to first. Her full story, from a male Indian bodhisattva to the figure people turn to first, is on our Guanyin page.