A Chinese Buddhist or Daoist(/Taoist) who has a question or a special request to ask of the deities will go to the temple to put in the question or request by drawing an oracle (or fortune) stick.
One jiggles a bamboo section containing numbered bamboo sticks (籤 / 签 qiān), while repeating the request or question, e.g., “Should my son apply for the job in that advert?” (The quantity of sticks can vary.) At some point, the jiggling will make one of the sticks fall out.
Note the number on that stick, then proceed to ask the deities for confirmation.
The oracle sticks set includes a wooden kidney sliced vertically down the middle into two halves. You pick up the wooden kidney, and ask the deities, “Is No.xx bamboo stick the right answer to my question about whether my son should apply for that job in the advert?”
Repeat the question a few more times (in case the deities didn’t hear you properly the first couple of times), then throw the wooden kidney down onto the temple floor.
If the two halves fall on the same side (both on the flat side, or both on the bulging side), that’s not the right bamboo stick. You put the bamboo stick back into the hollow section, and start jiggling again.
Only when the wooden kidney halves fall on the floor with one side up and one side down is that numbered bamboo stick the correct answer.
You take it to the corner of the temple where there’re numbered slips of paper (about 3” across x 4” down, if not bigger) inserted into slots on a notice-board type of set-up on the wall. There’ll usually be someone (often an old man) sitting there, to help you: to give you the right numbered slip, or to interpret the message for you if you can’t do it yourself.
What’s printed on those slips would normally be a Chinese poem (typically but not exclusively 5 characters or 7 characters, in classical Chinese) for you to decode as the answer to your question or request.
An example: after I did my Pre-U exams (for getting into medical school), I tried this 求籤 / 求签 procedure.
The story on my slip was: the mother of a certain historical figure was very ill; the doctor said she could only get better by eating bamboo shoots. It was not the season for bamboo shoots. The filial son sat at the base of a bamboo tree in a grove, and cried his eyes out — I don’t know for how long — until the deities took pity on him and made the bamboo shoots appear.
The message is: not impossible, but will need a lot of effort.
In my case, however, I went AFTER I’d done my exams, so any extra effort at catch-up would be too late anyway.
Yes, I’d failed two subjects out of five.
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