N 000°

https://fengshui.info/bagua/

The Bagua

Turn the ring. Read the room.

A compass and a floor plan at once. Choose a sector, or on a phone let the ring follow the compass, and read off the trigram, the element, the colours and the life area the tradition assigns to the direction you are facing.

Bearing N 000°

Turn the ring, or choose a sector

N · 337.5°–22.5°Lo Shu 1

North

Trigram Kan

Kan · Water

The abysmal, the deep · Middle son

Season · hour
Winter · Midnight
Colours
Black, Deep blue
Life area Western bagua
Career and life path
Sun on this wall 45°N
Jun 6.8 h · Dec none
Lo Shu
1 · middle son

The direction of deep water and of the year’s turning. Classical siting put the back of a house here, against the cold, so that the building sat with north at its shoulders and faced the sun.

Read about North Water

How to read it

Three layers, one instrument.

  1. 01The ring is the compass: 360 degrees divided into 24 “mountains” of 15°, three to each of the eight directions. Every direction on this site is given as a bearing on this ring.
  2. 02The sectors carry the eight trigrams of the Later Heaven arrangement, each with its element. The trigram is drawn with its bottom line toward the centre, the way it appears on a luopan.
  3. 03The plan at the centre is the Lo Shu square: the same eight sectors as a grid of nine, north up, the way the bagua is laid over a floor plan. The numbers are the Lo Shu numbers.

The life areas (career, knowledge, family and so on) belong to the Western bagua of the late twentieth century, which lays the grid over the plan from the front door rather than from the compass. We show them because you will meet them everywhere, and label them so you know which tradition they come from.

Understanding the Bagua 8 min

The bagua as a nine-sector grid, north up 1 N Kan water Career and life path 8 NE Gen earth Knowledge and self-cultivation 3 E Zhen wood Family and health 4 SE Xun wood Wealth and prosperity 9 S Li fire Fame and reputation 2 SW Kun earth Relationships and partnership 7 W Dui metal Children and creativity 6 NW Qian metal Helpful people and travel 5 Centre earth Health, the whole
Fig.North up, as on this site and on a modern compass.
The bagua as a nine-sector grid, south up 1 N Kan water Career and life path 8 NE Gen earth Knowledge and self-cultivation 3 E Zhen wood Family and health 4 SE Xun wood Wealth and prosperity 9 S Li fire Fame and reputation 2 SW Kun earth Relationships and partnership 7 W Dui metal Children and creativity 6 NW Qian metal Helpful people and travel 5 Centre earth Health, the whole
Fig.South up, as in classical Chinese diagrams, where Li (fire) sits at the top.

Sources for this page · the full bibliography

  1. 01 Eva Wong, Feng-shui: The Ancient Wisdom of Harmonious Living for Modern Times (1996). Shambhala. A compass-school practitioner’s account of the Form and Compass methods, clear about which is which.
  2. 02 Stephen Skinner, Guide to the Feng Shui Compass: A Compendium of Classical Feng Shui (2008). Golden Hoard Press. The most thorough English description of the luopan and its rings; our reference for the twenty-four mountains.
  3. 03 Sarah Rossbach, Interior Design with Feng Shui (1987). E. P. Dutton. The room-by-room application of the Black Sect method.
  4. 04 Lillian Too, The Complete Illustrated Guide to Feng Shui (1996). Element Books. The best-selling popular manual. Cited here as a record of what the popular tradition says, not as an authority on what the classical one does.
  5. 05 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought (1956). Cambridge University Press. Places geomancy within Chinese correlative thinking: yin–yang, the five phases, the trigrams.

The sectors, trigrams and elements follow the Later Heaven arrangement as the compass manuals give it; the life-area labels shown for comparison are the Black Sect's. The bearing is yours, and the explorer computes nothing about fortune from it.

Drawing
200%