The Books This Comes From

Every reading on this site comes out of a named text, and most of those texts are old enough that the disagreements between them are themselves part of the record. Where two of them disagree we would rather say which one we follow and why than quietly pick one and present it as the tradition.

One caution applies to all of it. These are transmitted texts: editions differ, centuries of commentary are layered in, and the authorship of the oldest is traditional rather than documented. So nothing here derives a calculation from a quotation. The arithmetic lives in code, each rule stated in one line and checked against published charts; the books tell you where the idea came from, not what the answer is.

The oldest definition of the term itself sits in the Zang Shu, the Book of Burial, traditionally attributed to the Jin dynasty scholar Guo Pu (276–324). It is short enough to memorize, and it is the reason the discipline is named after weather rather than after houses.

Two things, and they run through everything else on this site. The first is that the subject is movement rather than decoration: every rule you will meet here is a rule about something arriving, gathering, or leaking away. A door is read as an intake, a corridor as a current, a staircase facing a door as a drain — not as good or bad objects, but as places where a flow does something.

The second is an order of priority, set out by the same text a few lines later: in the method of feng shui, obtaining water comes first and sheltering from the wind second. That is why a site reading starts with what is open in front of a building and only then asks what is solid behind it.

The oldest surviving text about dwellings rather than graves is the Huangdi Zhai Jing (Yellow Emperor's House Classic), a Tang-dynasty compilation issued under a much older name, the Yellow Emperor's. It is where the metaphor this site uses for a floor plan comes from, and it is considerably more precise than the modern paraphrases of it.

The late Tang master Yang Yunsong — Yang Jiupin, 'Yang who saves the poor,' by the nickname that stuck — heads the Jiangxi lineage, the Form School half of the discipline, which reads the shape of land and building and calculates almost nothing. Four works are traditionally placed under his name: the Han Long Jing (Classic of Shaking the Dragon) and its companion the Yi Long Jing (Classic of Doubting the Dragon), on the forms of mountains; the Qing Nang Ao Yu (Secret Words of the Green Satchel); and the Tian Yu Jing (Heavenly Jade Classic).

The Han Long Jing is the one worth knowing about even if you never open it. It sorts mountain forms into nine star shapes — Tan Lang (Greedy Wolf), Ju Men (Giant Gate), Lu Cun (Rewarding Existence), Wen Qu (Literary Arts), Lian Zhen (Chastity), Wu Qu (Military Arts), Po Jun (Army Breaker) and the two assistants, Zuo Fu (Left Assistant) and You Bi (Right Assistant) — a vocabulary invented for landscape that was later carried wholesale into the flying stars, where the same nine names attach to numbers instead of to hills. When you read that the 9 in a chart is You Bi, the Right Assistant, this is where the name comes from.

The lineage the tradition traces from him runs through his student Zeng Wenchan and later Lai Wenjun, the Lai Buyi of the stories. What that line contributes to a modern reading is the part no chart can supply: a building sitting in a wind tunnel between two towers has a problem that no calculation will argue away.

The counterpart text is the Qing Nang Jing, the Green Satchel Classic, which sets out the number relationships the whole calculating half, the Compass School, rests on.

Those pairs are the He Tu, the River Chart: one and six are water, two and seven fire, three and eight wood, four and nine metal, five and ten earth. A flying star does not take its element from this line. Each number takes the element of the trigram that sits in its own Lo Shu palace, so 1 is Water, 2 Earth, 3 and 4 Wood, 5 Earth, 6 and 7 Metal, 8 Earth and 9 Fire. The He Tu enters the chart another way: when the two numbers of one pair meet in the same palace, Xuan Kong reads them as combining, and a 2 and a 7 together, for instance, are read as fire.

It is also the join between the two halves. The Lo Shu gives each number a seat on the compass and, through the trigram in that seat, an element; the He Tu says which numbers belong together. Put them together and a number in a palace is saying something about a direction and about a material at the same time — which is what makes a remedy expressible as an object rather than only as an instruction.

By the Qing dynasty the material had been condensed into books a builder could use. Two of them sit behind readings on this site.

The Bazhai Mingjing (Bright Mirror of the Eight Mansions) is the standard statement of Eight Mansions: a person and a house each belong to an East group or a West group, and the eight wandering stars — Sheng Qi (vitality), Tian Yi (heavenly doctor), Yan Nian (longevity), Fu Wei (stability) and the four difficult ones — are simply the eight relationships that can hold between two trigrams. That is what the personal reading computes when it gives you four directions to favor and four to treat with care.

The Yang Zhai San Yao (Three Essentials of the House), by Zhao Jiufeng, narrows a whole dwelling to three things and judges it on those alone: door, master and stove — the front door, the master bedroom, and the kitchen stove. It is a blunt instrument and it is meant to be. If you only ever check three things in a home, the tradition's own answer for which three is this one, and it has not changed in two hundred years.

Xuan Kong Flying Stars was taught privately for most of its history. The earlier texts that survive — the Tian Yu Jing and the Du Tian Bao Zhao Jing (Precious Illumination Classic) among them — are deliberately hard to use: written in verse, with the operative terms left as riddles that a teacher was supposed to unlock in person.

That ended in the late Qing with Shen Zhureng, who reconstructed the method and had it published — the collection that became Shen's Xuan Kong Studies (Shen Shi Xuan Kong Xue). Almost every modern flying star chart, including the ones drawn here, traces to that publication rather than to the verse behind it.

It is worth being plain about what that means for certainty. A method that spent centuries as a riddle accumulated variant readings, and they do not all reconcile. Where a variant would change a chart, we take the reading that matches the published charts we can check against, and we say which — the article on flying stars has the one case where the rule most English sources print gives the wrong answer for half the facings.

The almanac is a separate tradition again, and it has an unusually well-documented source: the Xieji Bianfang Shu, the Qing court's almanac manual, commissioned by the Qianlong emperor and completed in 1741 — a state project to work out which of the date-selection rules then in circulation were coherent and which were not.

Its scale is also why this site does not copy the almanacs sold at newsstands. The 'suits' and 'avoid' lines printed there come from hundreds of portent rules, and nobody can reproduce them from a formula. So this site computes the layers it can state in one line each — the day officer, the lunar mansion, the sound element (Na Yin), Peng Zu's cautions, and six portents whose rules we can write down — prints those, and says on the page that the rest is missing because we could not verify it.

This is the part most introductions leave out. The classics are not one system. They are several, and some of their answers contradict each other.

The largest split is between the San He (Three Harmonies) school and the San Yuan (Three Cycles) school — two different ways of dividing the compass and of counting time, each with its own texts and each internally consistent. A practitioner from each can look at the same house and disagree about which corner is favorable, and neither of them is making it up.

A smaller and more visible one: Eight Mansions fixes a building's good sectors from its facing and never changes them, while Xuan Kong Flying Stars redraws the whole chart every twenty years. Read literally they cannot both be the last word. The settlement the tradition arrived at, and the one we use, is that they answer different questions — Eight Mansions is about the fit between a person and a room, Xuan Kong about what a building is passing through.

And a third, which you will meet the moment you read anything in English: the Bagua map anchored to the compass, which is the classical method, against the popular Western version anchored to the front door. We use the compass, because it is the one that stays consistent with everything else here. The door-based method is not a corruption of the classics so much as a different thing that borrowed their diagram.

Calculated here, from the texts above: Eight Mansions in the form the Bazhai Mingjing gives it; Xuan Kong Flying Stars in Shen Zhureng's line; the relations between birth-year signs, and the sound element of the birth year; the almanac layers just named; and the lunar calendar itself, computed from astronomy rather than copied out of a table.

Not calculated, and not faked: the portents whose rules we cannot state; the compass position of the fetal spirit, which is a sixty-day table we have not verified; a full birth-chart reading; and any chart that would turn on a facing measured near the boundary between two of the 24 mountains — there the tool warns you instead of guessing.

That last one is the whole posture in a line. What is interesting about these books is that they are specific enough to be checked. A reading that is confidently wrong is worth less than one that stops and says so.