In Chinese and Vietnamese temples, you will find these shaking sticks. They have many names: kau cim, chi chi sticks, Oracle of Quan Yin, and numerous others. It involves usually a bamboo tube where the sticks stay in, typically there is either 100 or 78 sticks with the numbers written on the sticks. Each of the numbers correspond to a sheet of paper that have some sort of prediction on it. They then will shake the tube until one stick falls to the ground. Many times they will bring it to a monk or nun to have it interpreted for them. Monastics who are in charge of these areas tend to have a lot of material possessions as luck would have it. These devices and the oracles remain in use in temples due to the wonderful cognitive bias where people usually only remember the good things that happen when performing acts of woo woo. When they eventually have something turn out to be true, they will put money in the often very large donation box and come back for future foreign telling, and so the endless cycle continues.

Some temples have tried to legitimize the practice by attaching something like Dhammapada verses to the numbers instead. They will also be housed in with the deceased and/or with a statue of a saint-like person that changes name or sex (though mostly female) depending on the culture. This person goes by many names including, but not limited to: Quan Âm, Quan Yin, Kannon, and many others. They will do lots of praying towards this statue and do their offerings of many things to help stack the odds in their favor before using the sticks. Also of note, this statue appears in the forms of Buddhism that came after the Theravada form of Buddhism. Recently though, even in Theravada Buddhist countries, you can start to find her in temples due to more Chinese or Vietnamese immigrants and the sticks often follow close behind.

There are some prescriptions in the Buddhist suttas against monastics getting involved with performing horoscopes and other forms of woo woo in the Digha Nikaya:

“Whereas some contemplatives & brahmans, living off food given in faith, maintain themselves by wrong livelihood, by such “animal” arts as: reading marks on the limbs [e.g., palmistry]; reading omens and signs; interpreting celestial events [falling stars, comets]; interpreting dreams; reading features of the body [e.g., phrenology]; reading marks on cloth gnawed by mice; offering fire oblations, oblations from a ladle, oblations of husks, rice powder, rice grains, ghee, and oil; offering oblations from the mouth; offering blood-sacrifices; making predictions based on the fingertips; geomancy; making predictions for state officials; laying demons in a cemetery; placing spells on spirits; earth-skills [divining water and gems?]; snake-skills, poison-skills, scorpion-skills, rat-skills, bird-skills, crow-skills; predicting life spans; giving protective charms; casting horoscopes — he abstains from wrong livelihood, from “animal” arts such as these.

Source: Samaññaphala Sutta: The Fruits of the Contemplative Life (DN 2)