Tibetan Mo Divination: Buddhist Yes or No Answers
Across every culture and every era, humans have invented ways to generate random yes or no answers. From cracked tortoise shells in ancient China to digital random number generators on your phone, the underlying principle has never changed: ask a question, trust the answer.
The Unbroken Chain of Yes and No
What makes yes or no decision making so remarkable is its universality. There is no known culture in human history that has not developed some form of binary oracle. From the Aboriginal Australians (who have practiced for over 60,000 years) to the ancient Greeks, from West African Ifa priests to Tibetan monks, every society independently arrived at the same conclusion: sometimes, the wisest thing you can do is ask a simple question and trust a random answer.
Modern science has begun to validate what our ancestors intuitively knew. Research in decision psychology shows that random binary choices can reduce anxiety, break decision paralysis, and often lead to outcomes that feel "right" in retrospect. When we flip a coin or click a yes or no button, we are not abandoning wisdom. We are tapping into the oldest form of it.
The ancient wisdom of yes or no decision making is not a relic of the past. It is a living tradition, as relevant today as it was when the first human picked up a bone and asked the universe a question.