Hiring a practitioner

Most people who read about feng shui will at some point consider paying someone to read their house, and the site, which has spent sixty articles teaching a reader to do it themselves, owes them a straight account of what they would be buying. A classical consultation is a specific service with a specific order, an ethnography and a literature; the trade that has grown round it is something else, and the two are easy to confuse because they use the same words. This guide gives the practitioner as the villages knew them, the visit as it is done, the report a client should receive, the fees, and the signs by which a reading can be told from a sale.

The master

The practitioner’s Chinese title is xiansheng, the one born before, the same word as for a teacher or a doctor, and the feng shui xiansheng was for centuries a figure of the village rather than a profession of the city: a man, almost always, with a compass, a manual and a reputation, called to a grave, a house or a new door, paid in a red packet, and kept in work by the families whose fortunes were seen to hold. Bruun’s fieldwork in rural China, through the decades when the practice was illegal and the years after, found the masters part-time and local, farmers and schoolteachers with a luopan in a drawer, consulted for a burial first and a house second, and judged by results over years; the trade in the cities, which he describes in his introduction, is a different animal, urban, full-time, advertised and fee-charging, and it grew in Hong Kong and Taiwan while the mainland’s masters were silent. Emmons’s survey of Hong Kong in the early 1990s found consultation ordinary and unembarrassed, for a move, a business and an opening date before anything else. Feuchtwang’s analysis of a practitioner’s reading, made in Taiwan in the 1960s, is the site’s account of what a reading is: a walk, a compass, a set of correlations and a judgement, in that order, with the judgement resting on the walk more than the client expects.

The visit, in order

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A classical consultation has an order and a good practitioner keeps it. It begins with a brief at a table, before anything is looked at: who lives in the house and who will; their years of birth, which the Compass schools need for the kua and the Form school does not need at all; when the house was built or last entered, for the flying-star period; what is wrong, what is wanted, and how the household sleeps and works. Then the street. The practitioner walks the approach before touching the door, reading what stands behind the house, what flanks it and what faces it, the four animals at the scale of a block, and the lines the sha catalogue names. Then the door, where the one measurement of the visit is taken: the compass set on the threshold, away from steel, the facing read in degrees and read again, because every chart in a compass reading follows from that bearing and a degree either side of a boundary changes the house; the luopan essay gives the instrument and the facing direction guide the method. Then the rooms, walked with the plan in hand, the bed, the desk and the stove located and their lines drawn from the door and the window, which is the command position done room by room. Then the report. Two hours is a normal visit for a flat and half a day for a house with ground; a reading done in twenty minutes from the sofa has skipped the street and the door, and is a conversation.

What you should receive

A consultation ends in writing, and the writing is the product. A proper report gives the facing of the house in degrees and the mountain it falls in; the plan, marked with the eight sectors from the centre; the school the reading belongs to, since a Form reading, an Eight Mansions reading and a Flying Stars reading of the same house are three documents and a client should know which they have; the findings in order of weight, the bed and the desk before the wealth corner; the remedies in order of cost, the ones that cost nothing first, a bed moved, a door kept clear, a mirror taken down, before anything is bought; the almanac’s dates if changes are to be made, which the choosing a day essay explains; and a plain statement of what cannot be fixed, which in the classics includes the advice to move. Paton’s translations of the classics show the form the masters’ own texts took, a description of the site, a judgement and a prescription, and a modern report that follows it is following the tradition. One that consists of a list of objects to buy is following the shop.

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The drawing gives the page with its ten parts numbered, and the numbers on it are the worked house of a house, read, so that a reader can set a report they have been given beside it. Nine of the ten parts can be checked by the client with a compass, a ruler and an afternoon; the tenth, the chart, is the part that is taken on trust, which is why it stands beside the plan and not above it. A report that has the ten is a survey with a vocabulary, whatever its school. One that has the chart and the shopping list and nothing between them has left out the house.

A reading and a sale

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The tradition’s practice and the trade’s can be told apart at the door, and the drawing gives six signs of each. A practitioner reading a house looks before speaking, sets a compass on the threshold and reads it twice, asks how the household sleeps and works before it asks about money, names the school, gives the cheapest remedy first, and says what cannot be fixed. One selling to a house sells the cure, in objects, figures or a shop of their own; leads with fear, a curse, a death in the family, a thing that must be done; promises results by a date; works without a compass, or with a phone held against a steel door; cannot say which school, because “all of them” means none; and wants a yearly return without a chart that changes. The classics are on the client’s side here. The Book of Burial says that a site whose forms are wrong should be abandoned, and a master who has never told a client to move is not following the book they cite; and the manuals of the Ming and Qing are full of warnings against the quack, which means the quack was there and the tradition knew.

Before you call, and after

1. Read the room yourself first. The in a day guide is the afternoon’s work a consultation would begin with; a client who has done it can judge the reading.
2. Ask which school. Form, Eight Mansions, Flying Stars, or a named lineage; and how long a visit takes. Twenty minutes is not a visit.
3. Expect the street and the door. A practitioner who does not walk the approach or set a compass on the threshold is not doing the classical reading.
4. Give the years, not the hour. The kua needs a year of birth; the hour is astrology, and the Four Pillars essay says what that buys.
5. Insist on writing. The facing in degrees, the plan with its sectors, the findings in order, the remedies by cost, what cannot be fixed.
6. Pay for advice, not objects. A fee for the visit and the report; nothing for cures, and nothing from a shop the practitioner owns.
7. Check the plain findings. Bed, desk, door, light, noise: if these are right, trust the rest a little; if they are wrong, trust none of it.
8. Keep the report. A reading is a document of the house; the next practitioner, or the next buyer, should be able to read it.