Why I Turned an Old Chinese Oracle Book Into a Website

An old book survives, its pages worn and torn;
Within it, turns of fortune lie concealed.
Hold your wish in reverence, silently,
And wait for Heaven’s hidden pattern to be revealed.
The wisdom of the ancients travels through the ages;
May those who come after cherish it together.
Do not treat the oracle as a game;
Ask with sincerity, and let your intention run deep.

I did not build Wise Oracle because I had proved that an old book could predict the future.

The real beginning of this website was a summer afternoon when I was eighteen, waiting for the result of an exam I could no longer change.

The Books No One Read

There were always old books scattered around my childhood home.

They were not a treasured family collection, and they had not been passed down through generations. Most of them had been picked up by my father, one at a time, from used-book stalls.

I never knew exactly why he bought them. Perhaps they were inexpensive. Perhaps he opened one while passing a stall, found a page interesting, and decided to bring it home. Some of the books were read. Some were only briefly opened. Others were never touched again after the day they arrived.

Over the years, they drifted into the forgotten parts of the house. Some ended up at the bottom of cabinets. Some were pressed beneath heavier things in wooden chests. Others were mixed with old newspapers and magazines in corners no one had a reason to visit.

They were a strange collection: novels, miscellaneous notes, old almanacs, and incomplete booklets from different periods. Some had lost their covers. The thread in their bindings had come loose. Some pages were as yellow and brittle as autumn leaves. If you held them too firmly, the edges crumbled. Tiny wormholes ran through others, and when I held those pages against the light, they looked like damaged constellations.

They also carried the unmistakable smell of old paper—a mixture of dust, dampness, and time.

I can appreciate that smell now. As a child, I could not. To me, the books were dirty and dull. Beside the clean print and bright covers of new books, they looked less like a library than a pile of things no one had gotten around to throwing away.

For years, I passed them without really seeing them.

Sometimes I moved a few books to reach something underneath. Sometimes I brushed dust from a cover while cleaning. It never occurred to me that something inside those abandoned pages might one day matter to me.

The book called Zhuge Shensuan was somewhere in that pile.

I do not know who owned it before it reached our home. Perhaps someone once consulted it carefully at a difficult moment. Perhaps it lay untouched on a bookstall for years. My father brought it home, placed it among the other old books, and no one mentioned it again.

I did not open it either—until the summer after the gaokao.

A Summer Suspended Between Hope and Fear

The gaokao is China's national college entrance examination. For many Chinese students, it is difficult to describe it as just another test. The result largely determines which universities they can apply to, and often which city—and what kind of life—they will enter next.

By the time I took it, almost everything I could remember had followed a clear sequence: go to school, prepare for an exam, move to the next level, then prepare for another exam. There was always a timetable. There was always a next task. Even when the pressure was heavy, the road itself was visible.

Then the gaokao ended, and the road suddenly disappeared.

The examination was over, but the scores had not been released. There were no more classes to attend, no assignments to finish, and no countdown left to watch. It felt as though I had been swimming in a strong current for years and had suddenly been thrown onto the shore. My body had stopped, but my mind was still rushing forward.

The future was very close, yet it had no shape.

I did not know what score I had earned. I did not know whether I would be admitted to a university, which city I might go to, or what the rest of my life would look like once that door opened. At eighteen, hope can be enormous. Fear can be just as large.

The drone of cicadas continued from morning until evening. The summer sun bleached the courtyard almost white. Everyone said I should enjoy the freedom now that the exam was over. But I discovered that having nothing to do does not automatically make a person calm.

Often, busyness only keeps our fears from speaking. When everything around us becomes quiet, those fears come out one by one and sit down in front of us.

That was when I remembered the old books.

I was not searching for wisdom. I only wanted something to read so that the long afternoon would pass more quickly.

I began pulling books from the dusty pile. Before long, my hands were black. I tried a few old novels, but their language felt distant and their stories moved too slowly for my restless mind. Then, beneath several damaged volumes, I found a thin booklet with a badly worn cover.

Its title was still visible:

Zhuge Shensuan—诸葛神算.

A Book Named for Wisdom

For a reader outside China, the name needs some explanation.

Zhuge Liang was a statesman and strategist from the Three Kingdoms period. History, literature, opera, and popular storytelling gradually turned him into one of China's great symbols of intelligence, foresight, and loyalty. The oracle text I had found was traditionally associated with his name, although I did not then know—and do not now need to claim—who actually composed it.

The title therefore carried a weight that is difficult to convey through literal translation. It suggested not simply fortune-telling, but the possibility of hidden calculation: that confusion might contain a pattern, and that a person with enough wisdom might be able to see it.

My first reaction was still skepticism.

I had grown up regarding divination, fortune-telling, and similar practices as superstition—things left behind by people who did not yet understand the world scientifically. A few sentences in an old booklet were not going to erase that view.

But I did not put the book back.

Perhaps that was because I had reached the point at which I most wanted an answer. When a result is beyond our control, even a skeptical person may find themselves listening for a voice that sounds certain.

The inside of the book was nothing like I expected. There were no elaborate mystical illustrations and no long sermons about fate. Its pages were dense and bewildering. At first, I could not understand what I was looking at or what I was supposed to do. It felt less like reading a book than standing at the entrance to a maze.

Eventually, I found the instructions.

I will leave the exact method for another article. What matters here is that I followed the book step by step, and what had seemed incomprehensible slowly resolved into a sentence. It felt like decoding a message that had been waiting inside the paper for a very long time.

When the sentence was complete, I felt a kind of astonishment I had never experienced before.

The Sentence I No Longer Remember

I no longer remember which oracle verse I received. I cannot quote the original wording. Too many years have passed, and the exact words are gone.

But I remember what they meant to me.

The message said, in essence, that I was passing through a difficult and uncertain period, but that it would soon end. The things I feared would probably not happen in the terrible way I imagined.

I did not suddenly believe I had heard a divine voice. I did not think a supernatural power had looked into my future. Beliefs formed over many years do not disappear because an old book produces one timely sentence.

And yet the sentence reached me.

Perhaps it mattered not because it predicted anything, but because on that hot, endless afternoon it said exactly what a frightened young person needed to hear:

Do not be afraid. This part will pass.

Those are ordinary words.

But the same words do not feel the same in every circumstance. To someone standing safely on the shore, “Do not be afraid” may sound like a simple reassurance. To someone struggling in the water, it may be enough to keep them afloat a little longer.

The book did not change my examination score. It did not decide which university would accept me. It simply steadied a heart that had been sinking.

When I closed the booklet that afternoon, nothing outside me had changed. The scores were still unknown. The admissions result had not arrived. My future had not become any more certain.

But I was less afraid.

What Happened Afterward

My score was not especially good. In many years, it might not have been enough for the kind of university I hoped to attend. But the admission cutoff was also low that year. A few circumstances happened to align, and against my own expectations, I did make it to university.

When the admission news arrived, I thought again of the book and of the sentence whose wording I had already begun to lose.

From one point of view, the oracle had been right.

From another, it was coincidence. My exam had already been graded before I opened the book. The admission line did not move because I wished it to. Nothing printed on those pages altered an objective fact.

I am comfortable leaving both possibilities on the table.

Psychology offers many ways to understand such an experience. People recognize themselves in open-ended language. Anxiety makes certainty more attractive. A hopeful suggestion can temporarily loosen fear. Learning how comfort works does not make the comfort unreal.

Rain can be explained as condensed water vapor, but that does not make a reunion in the rain meaningless. The moon is a natural satellite, but that does not prevent someone from missing a distant person in its light.

In the same way, Zhuge Shensuan may be understood as an old system of characters and numbers, as a form of projection, as accumulated observations about human life, or simply as coincidence. None of those explanations can erase the fact that, when I was eighteen and afraid, it gave me something to hold on to.

Not a Command, but a Mirror

In the years that followed, I sometimes returned to the book when I faced a decision I could not easily make or a result I could not predict.

Some verses were comforting. Some were unclear. Some made my heart sink. I did not treat them as commands, and I did not abandon ordinary judgment because of a line from an oracle.

Over time, the book became less like a window into the future and more like a mirror.

When a verse makes you happy, you may suddenly understand what you have been hoping for. When it disturbs you, you may discover what you are most afraid to lose. Sometimes we do not lack an answer. We lack the courage to admit which answer we already want.

Ancient readers might have called that hidden recognition tianji—a glimpse of “heaven's secret,” something normally concealed from view. A modern reader might call it projection, suggestion, intuition, or the subconscious. The names are different. They may point toward the same quiet place inside us.

That is also how I now understand sincerity in this tradition.

Sincerity does not require us to surrender doubt. It does not mean handing our lives over to a book. It means asking without lying to ourselves—and accepting that whatever answer appears, the responsibility for our choices remains our own.

Why I Brought the Book Online

Years later, the world had moved deeper into the age of computers, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

We can retrieve enormous amounts of information in seconds. Machines can analyze complicated questions. Advice that once required years of study can appear on a screen almost instantly. And yet human uncertainty has not disappeared.

Technology is often very good at answering, “How can this be done?” Data can estimate probabilities. Artificial intelligence can suggest options. But none of them can live with the consequences of a decision on our behalf. None can entirely remove the fear of waiting.

An ancient person might have waited anxiously for a letter carried over a long distance. Today, we refresh an inbox. The tools have changed. The human difficulty of living with uncertainty has not changed nearly as much.

For years, I wanted to preserve the contents of that old booklet. Part of the reason was practical: paper deteriorates, bindings loosen, and text can disappear. But I also wanted other people to encounter this distinctly Chinese way of reflecting on uncertainty, even if they did not own the book I had found.

So I began turning it into a website.

The words printed on brittle pages were transcribed, organized, and explained. A process that had once belonged entirely to paper could now unfold on a screen.

Bringing it into English required more than translation. Some parts of the tradition depend on language and cultural assumptions that are not immediately visible outside China. Those choices deserve an article of their own. For now, it is enough to say that I wanted to preserve the spirit of the book without pretending that every part of it could cross into another language unchanged.

I am not trying to preserve an infallible prediction machine. Nor do I want to polish an old object until it looks more mysterious than it really is.

What I want to preserve is a way of pausing.

A person steps out of the noise for a moment, faces a question honestly, and allows a sentence from an old book to reflect their hopes, fears, and choices back to them.

The Road Is Not Finished

Some people will visit Wise Oracle simply to experience a part of Chinese culture. Some may arrive during a difficult evening and find a little comfort. Others may read a verse that seems unrelated to their lives and still discover a thought they needed.

All of those responses are welcome.

I do not claim that this book can prove the future, and I do not want to exaggerate its mystery. A life must still be lived by the person who owns it. An oracle reading cannot replace action, professional advice, reason, or responsibility.

But I still remember that summer.

I remember the cicadas, the room full of sunlight, the dust on my fingers, and a young man sitting beside a pile of forgotten books, carefully searching for a sentence about his future.

What he found may not have been the future.

It was a sentence that made the waiting bearable.

When my father carried those books home from used-book stalls, he could not have imagined that one of them would appear many years later in another form, glowing on screens around the world.

Paper becomes brittle. Ink fades. The people who preserve books grow old. But the wish to find an answer in confusion—and the need for comfort when we are afraid—seem to have changed very little across the centuries.

Perhaps tradition is not the act of carrying the past into the present without changing a single thing. Perhaps it is helping something that once reached us find a new road toward those who come later.

If you are standing at a turning point of your own, you may choose to pause, put aside the surrounding noise, and ask yourself what you are truly seeking.

You do not have to accept a verse as the judgment of fate. You do not have to decide immediately whether it is true or false.

Sometimes a glimpse of tianji does not tell us what will happen next.

Sometimes it only reminds us:

This moment is not the whole story.

The road is not finished.

If you would like to experience the tradition for yourself, you can hold a question quietly in mind and consult the oracle.