What is feng shui?
Feng shui is the Chinese art of arranging a home so that chi, the living breath of a place, gathers and settles instead of scattering. Its name means wind and water: wind scatters chi, water holds it. The Form School reads a room by its shape; the compass schools read directions and the year.
Wind and water: where the name comes from
The two words hold the whole idea. Chi, the breath of a place, travels on the wind and scatters with it; where it meets water, it stops and gathers. So the old practitioners looked for ground that kept the wind out and held water before it, and the art took its name from the two: wind and water.
Chi is what you feel in a room before you can name it: the ease of a room that holds you, the unrest of one that everything rushes through. Feng shui sets the home at the root of a life, the place where strength gathers each night and is spent each day, which is why it asks so much of the bed, the door and the desk.
The schools, and what each reads
- The Form School is the oldest. It reads the shape of land and rooms: what shelters the places where people rest, what the door lines up with, what hangs overhead. LuckMove reads every room by this school, from a photo.
- Eight Mansions reads directions from the year you were born. Each person has a Kua number, four good directions and four best kept for storage; the Kua number chart gives yours.
- Flying Stars reads time. Each year nine stars move to new places in a home, and the tradition marks some of them to keep quiet; your home map for the year and the flying stars in 2027 set them out.
- Beside the schools of the home, the Four Pillars of birth, read for the five elements, give the colors that bring a person back to balance: your lucky colors.
What feng shui looks at in a room
- A solid wall behind the bed and the desk, with the door in view: where the bed goes, where the desk goes.
- The line of the door, which chi follows straight in: a bed facing the door, the front door.
- What presses from above: a beam over the bed.
- What reflects: where a mirror goes, a mirror facing the bed.
- Where fire and water sit: the stove, the bathroom.
- The room taken whole: the signs of bad feng shui.
Is feng shui real?
Feng shui is a tradition, not a science, and it asks for no belief. It has been practiced for well over a thousand years, and much of what the Form School asks of a room, a sheltered bed, a door in view, a quiet corner for rest, is what many people find makes a home easier to live in.
What it offers is the tradition’s view of a room, set out plainly; it makes no promise about what will happen to the people who live there.
Questions people ask
Water first, shelter from the wind second: that is the order feng shui has always kept. Indoors, shelter is where it starts: a solid wall behind the bed and the desk, and the door in view but not in line.
The Form School, which reads the shape of land and rooms, and the compass schools: chiefly Eight Mansions, which reads directions from the birth year, and Flying Stars, which reads where the year’s stars fall in a home.
Wind and water. Wind scatters chi and water holds it, and the art of keeping chi gathered took its name from the two.
No. It is a way of arranging the place you live in, and it sits beside any faith, or none.
Not for the Form School, which works from what can be seen. Eight Mansions and Flying Stars turn on directions, so they need to know which way is north in your home; your lucky directions show how to find it.