Feng Shui

Feng shui, "wind and water", is the Chinese art of placement, arranging a building or a site so that qi flows through it favorably. This report item works from the compass schools and the Five Elements, the bagua map, the productive and destructive cycles, and the sitting-and-facing directions, reading a person's own directions and element against them rather than casting a birth chart.

History

Feng shui draws on the same Wu Xing five phase cosmology and bagua trigrams this atlas's own Chinese Astrology and I Ching report items already describe, applying that shared cosmology to the reading of physical space rather than of a birth date. Two broadly recognized major schools developed within the tradition: the older Form School (xingshi), which reads the shape of landscape itself, hills, water and the contours of a site, and the later Compass School (liqi), generally associated with the Song dynasty onward, which uses the luopan, a specialized compass, and detailed directional and numerological calculation rather than landscape shape alone.

The Flying Stars system, which layers nine numbered stars over a building's floor plan according to its construction date and facing direction, is a documented later refinement within the Compass School tradition, adding a time based layer to the directional one.

How A Reading Is Constructed

A reading works from the compass schools rather than from a cast birth chart: it takes the elements and directions a person's own data indicates and reads them against the bagua map's eight directional trigrams and the Five Elements' productive and destructive cycles, the same cosmology the Chinese Astrology and I Ching pages already describe, naming favorable and unfavorable sitting-and-facing directions the way the Compass School tradition does for a building.

Where To Read More

• QianQian, heaven.
• KunKun, earth.
• WoodWood.
• WaterWater.
• RenRen, one of the Twenty-Four Mountains the Compass School reads sitting and facing directions against.
• ZiZi, a second of the Twenty-Four Mountains.
• One WhiteOne White, one of the nine Flying Stars the later Compass School refinement layers over a floor plan.
• Two BlackTwo Black, a second Flying Star.