Why the feng shui books disagree

Anyone who has read more than one feng shui book has hit this. One says the bed should go here. Another says never. One puts the bagua on the compass and the next lines it up with the front door.

It is confusing, and it puts a lot of people off. But there is a reason for it.

All the schools of feng shui grew from the same body of old knowledge. Over time they developed different ways of reading chi and balancing it. Two of the oldest and most traditional are Form School and Compass School, and there are several methods within Compass School as well.

The words get in the way too. The same trigram can turn up under two or three different spellings depending on the book. Some books work out the direction of a house from the way it faces, others from the way it sits. Even the beginner books describe one particular method, so you need to know which one you are reading about.

The main schools

• Form School. The study of the land around a home and the balance of everything near it: other buildings, hills and mountains, roads and highways, rivers and lakes.
• Eight Mansions, or East West. A compass method based on the eight directions. Every person and every building has four good directions and four poor ones, and belongs to either the east group or the west group, by birth date for a person or by sitting direction for a house. There is no time factor in this school.
• Flying Stars. A compass method that uses the eight trigrams and the Lo Shu magic square. Compass readings and the year the house was built both go into the calculations, so time matters here. The tradition says it rests on patterns that repeat reliably over time. It is said to work the fastest, and it is very hard to do well without a great deal of study and training.
• Life Aspiration. This uses the bagua as an energy map of eight areas, nine with the centre. Each area stands for one part of life and has its own element and colour. North, for example, is career, water, blue and black. The bagua is laid over the floor plan by the facing direction, usually the front door.
• Black Hat. Often called Western feng shui. It is spiritual and works with intention, and it draws in interior design, psychology, colour, the five elements, yin and yang, common sense and intuition. The bagua is placed from the front door, whatever the compass says. The map does not change and there is no time factor. Next to Form School, it is the simplest.

So which is right?

Each one is right on its own terms. The trouble starts when you take a tip from one school and another tip from a second and try to make them agree. Without proper training that is very hard to do.

If you are working from books, pick one school and stay with it for a while. Read the advice as part of that method, and do not expect it to match the book on the shelf beside it.

How I looked at a home

My own approach was always broader than most. When I analysed a home, I looked at it through all of these methods at once, then took the most useful parts of each and put them together for that house and the people living in it.

From the archive. First written for my journal years ago, and rewritten for life after 50.