THAI WEEKDAY
What is Thai Weekday Divination?
Thai weekday divination derives a guardian Buddha image, lucky color, and direction corresponding to the day of the week a person was born (Sunday through Saturday, with Wednesday split into day and night for eight variants in total), and reads tendencies in personality and fortune from these. Influenced by Indian astrology, it is deeply rooted in Thailand’s Buddhist culture.
Overview
- System
- Fate Reading (reads a guardian Buddha, color, and direction from the day of the week of birth)
- Origin
- Thailand
- What You Need
- Date of birth (day of the week)
- Best For
- Love, life, career
- Time Frame
- Life as a whole
Origins & History
Thai weekday divination is bound up with Thai Buddhist devotion, assigning a differently posed Buddha image to each day of the week and having a person pray to the image of the day they were born as their personal guardian Buddha. Each day’s Buddha image takes a posture tied to a specific episode in the life of the historical Buddha — meditating, reclining, receiving alms, and so on — and because Wednesday alone is assigned separate images for day and night, there are eight postures in all.
The idea of linking each day of the week to a color and a guardian deity is said to reflect the influence of ancient Indian astrology, which deified nine celestial bodies, and it is widely found across the Buddhist cultures of Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. In Thailand it is common for people to know the day of the week on which they were born, and the custom of wearing the lucky color assigned to one’s birth day remains strongly alive today.
How It Works
- 01Determine the day of the week of birth (Sunday through Saturday, with Wednesday split into day and night) from the date of birth.
- 02Check the guardian Buddha image corresponding to that day.
- 03Check the lucky color and direction assigned to that day.
- 04Read tendencies in personality and fortune by combining these with the stories associated with the guardian Buddha and the meanings of the color and direction.
What It Reveals
This is a divination practice enjoyed daily in Thailand, well suited to grasping innate personality tendencies and a guide for the color and direction to favor day to day. At the same time, because the sole input is the day of the week of birth, it is a simple system that cannot capture the finer, highly individual events of a person’s life, and it does not aim for the level of precision offered by astrology systems that use the full date of birth.
Related Methods
References
- Wikipedia: Colors of the day in Thailand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_the_day_in_Thailand)
- Wikipedia: Iconography of Gautama Buddha in Laos and Thailand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconography_of_Gautama_Buddha_in_Laos_and_Thailand)