What are Guan Yin fortune sticks?

Drawing a numbered stick and reading a matching verse is called qiuqian (求籤) in Mandarin and kau cim in Cantonese. In English it often goes by fortune sticks or temple lots. Each stick is a thin slip, usually bamboo, marked with a number.

Guan Yin's set is one of many. Different gods have their own sets, and a Daoist reference database describes several, including one for Emperor Guan with 100 poems and an extra stick. One researcher is reported to have sorted 420 sets into 24 categories.

A printed slip can carry more than the poem. A group of slips from a temple in Guangdong, now at the Horniman Museum, gives the number and a title, a four-sentence poem built on metaphor, and a four-sentence explanation of it.

A study of a Guan Yin temple at Hung Hom in Hong Kong, built in 1873, describes the basic sequence. The worshipper kneels before the image and shakes a bamboo cup of 100 numbered slivers until one falls out. Wikipedia adds that if several fall, the attempt usually does not count and the person shakes again.

The number leads to one of the 100 verses. At that temple some people read the verse themselves, some use a book at home, and others hand the stick to a priest, who finds the matching slip and explains it.

Many temples also ask for a throw of two moon blocks to confirm that the stick is the right one. Grades are another point of difference. The Hong Kong study reports 30 verses marked superior, 55 middling and 15 inferior. We have not surveyed how other temples grade them.

The Daoist Culture Centre database places divinatory sticks in Daoist temples at the end of the Tang dynasty, with Buddhist temples and folk shrines taking them up afterward. Its evidence is an anecdote from a collection called Pure Talk of the Jade Kettle (玉壺清話), in which a boy named Lu Duoxun comes upon sticks at Yunyang temple and his father keeps one whose poem seemed to foretell the boy's career. Lu lived from 934 to 985, after the Tang ended, so the story cannot show sticks in the Tang.

A firmer marker is a printed book. The Tianzhu lingqian (天竺靈籤) survives in 86 woodblocks of an edition said to be from the Southern Song, and is said to be the oldest illustrated collection of oracle verses in China. Iku Hidaka of the University of Tsukuba reports that its verses passed to Ming China and, from the 17th century, to Japan, where versions run to 100 blocks.

The Guan Yin name is attached to that line in Japanese printing. Tohoku University holds a copy titled 天竺靈感觀音籤頌百首, roughly the hundred Guan Yin lot verses of Tianzhu, with a postscript dated 1662.

Stick divination continues in temples across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. Wikipedia says it survived the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in mainland China.

The verses on this site follow the text used in Taiwanese temples. Each lot page lists the sources compared and where they differ.

The Guan Yin verses used in Taiwanese temples have no known author and no single original edition. We have not established how that text relates to the Southern Song Tianzhu book, so we do not call one the ancestor of the other.

One study repeats two common statements: that the Guan Yin verses are at least 1,000 years old, and that monks wrote them under guidance from Guan Yin in meditation, one of them said to be her incarnation. We could not trace either to a dated copy. The second is a story about the verses and cannot be checked as history.

An encyclopedia article carries a claim that the practice goes back to the Jin dynasty, citing a Jade Box Records attributed to the Daoist Xu Xun. The article carries a general notice that it needs more citations, and we found nothing to confirm it.