On How the Four Favourable Gods Can Break a Structure (Si Ji Shen Neng Po Ge)

Auspicious Names Are Not a Licence

Wealth, officer, seal and food god are called favourable, but the name guarantees nothing. Shen gives four short cases in which each of them, applied at the wrong moment, is the very thing that breaks the structure. The lesson is the same one the previous chapters kept repeating: what matters is whether a god serves the structure, not what it is called.