Twelve things feng shui does not say
The claims most often attached to the tradition, where each of them comes from, and what the tradition says instead. For readers who have been told something with great confidence.
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Feng shui has been in English for a hundred and fifty years and in the decorating press for forty, and it has picked up a layer of claims that the tradition itself does not make. Some are recent inventions, some are one school’s teaching promoted to law, some are misreadings of a real rule. Here are twelve, each with its source and with what the tradition says instead. None of them is in the classical texts.
1 · “Feng shui is about money”
Where it comes from. The commercial turn of the 1990s: the wealth corner, the money frog, the prosperity bagua, the consultant’s promise. It sells, and it is what most people now think the subject is for.
What the tradition says. The classical subject is where to site a grave and a house so that the dead and the living are sheltered from wind and served by water. Wealth is one of several fortunes the texts mention, and never the first; the Zangshu’s word is not wealth but sheng qi, the qi that generates. A well-sited house is a comfortable and healthy one, and a household in such a house prospers in every sense of the word. That is as far as the texts go.
2 · “The far-left corner from the door is the wealth corner”
Where it comes from. The Black Sect Tantric Buddhist school, taught in the United States from the 1980s, which orients its bagua to the front door rather than to the compass and labels its nine sectors with life areas: wealth in the far-left corner, relationships in the far-right, career at the door. Rossbach’s books carried it into English and the decorating press made it universal.
What the tradition says. The classical bagua is fixed to the compass: the south-east is Xun, wind and Wood, whatever the door does, and the Compass schools read it by direction and by the occupant’s kua, not by a corner relative to the door. The life-area map is one school’s modern device. It is a usable one, and it is not classical, and the schools page draws the two baguas side by side.
3 · “A mirror facing the bed steals your soul”
Where it comes from. Household belief, Chinese and European alike, in which mirrors are doors to somewhere else and the sleeper is unguarded. The feng shui manuals absorbed it.
What the tradition says. The manuals dislike a mirror facing the bed for reasons of disturbance: reflected movement that startles a half-asleep person, a room that seems to have a second door, and, in the Black Sect reading, a doubled couple. The practical concern is real and the soul is not in it. The mirror guide draws where a mirror can go.
4 · “It is a science” and “It is a religion”
Where it comes from. Both framings are Western. Eitel, in 1873, called feng shui the rudiments of natural science in China; the missionaries around him called it superstition; a century later the decorating press called it ancient wisdom, and its critics call it religion.
What the tradition says. Nothing, because the question is not one it asks. Feuchtwang’s analysis is the useful one: feng shui is a system of correlations, cosmological in its premises, practised by specialists and argued over by clients, in which some claims are about things a body can check, light, wind, water, noise, a wall behind the bed, and most are not. This site labels the two kinds differently, and the methodology page explains how.
5 · “A toilet in the south-east flushes your wealth away”
Where it comes from. An inference inside the Black Sect map: the wealth sector plus a room where water leaves. It is repeated in most popular manuals and has become the best-known bathroom rule.
What the tradition says. The classical house had no bathroom, and the texts have nothing to say about drains. The modern manuals ask for the bathroom to be closed, dry and out of the line of the front door and the bed; the bathroom page has the rest. Where the bathroom sits on the compass is not one of the rules that survives contact with the plumbing.
6 · “Facing doors make a household quarrel”
Where it comes from. A real rule, stretched. The manuals mark two doors that open opposite one another across a corridor as arguing doors, and popular writing concludes that the people behind them will argue.
What the tradition says. That two facing doors cost both rooms their privacy and that the arrangement should be avoided or one door kept shut. The concern is spatial, sightlines and sound. The prophecy is a modern flourish, and the hallways page treats the doors as what they are.
7 · “You need coins, frogs, crystals and lucky bamboo”
Where it comes from. The shops. Bruun describes the commodification of feng shui in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the West, where a practice of placement became a trade in objects, and the Black Sect’s catalogue of cures, crystals, flutes, wind chimes, gave the objects a school to belong to.
What the tradition says. Move the bed. Classical practice is a practice of placement and orientation, and its remedies are walls, screens, plants, water and light in the right places. Where a Compass school prescribes an object, metal beneath a difficult star, it prescribes a material, not a purchase. Nothing in the texts requires buying anything.
8 · “Your kua number decides where you must sleep”
Where it comes from. The Eight Mansions method, a Compass school of real standing, in which a number from the birth year gives each person four favourable and four unfavourable directions. Popular writing turns the preference into a law.
What the tradition says. Eight Mansions is one school among several, and its premises, that a birth year confers a lifelong orientation, are its own. The practitioners who teach it apply it after the command position, not instead of it, and it has never resolved what a couple with opposing groups should do. The Eight Mansions page sets out the method and the couple problem together.
9 · “A red front door brings luck”
Where it comes from. Red is the auspicious colour of Chinese festival and marriage, and the colour-by-element scheme of the modern manuals gives a south-facing door the colour of Fire. The general rule is a decorating extension.
What the tradition says. The classical texts speak of the shape, size and direction of a door and say nothing about paint. Colour by element is a practitioner adaptation, useful and recent, in which a south door might be red and a north door would be dark, blue or black. A red door on a north-facing house is a Fire door on a Water side, which the same scheme would advise against. The front door guide gives the rules that do exist.
10 · “Unchanged for five thousand years”
Where it comes from. Marketing. The number is a round one and it attaches itself to everything Chinese.
What the tradition says. The record shows continuous change. The Zangshu is a text of roughly the fourth century whose attribution to Guo Pu is itself uncertain; the compass and the Compass schools belong to the Song and after; the Flying Star system was systematised under the Ming and Qing; the Black Sect school dates from the 1980s; and feng shui was suppressed in the People’s Republic after 1949 as superstition and revived from the 1980s, as Bruun documents. The history page draws the timeline. A living tradition is one that changes.
11 · “Furniture must float away from the walls so that qi can circulate”
Where it comes from. A maxim of interior decorating, repeated in feng shui writing until it sounded like a rule of the tradition.
What the tradition says. The opposite, for seats and beds. The main seat and the bed are asked to have a solid wall behind them; qi is asked to move through the room, not behind the sofa. Pull the furniture off the wall for proportion if the room is large enough. The sofa guide draws the seat the tradition actually wants.
12 · “Sleeping with your head to the north is bad” (or good, because of magnetism)
Where it comes from. Two sources. A folk custom, strongest in Japan, avoids the north pillow because the dead are laid with the head to the north; and a modern pseudo-science claims the body should align with the earth’s magnetic field, or should not.
What the tradition says. Neither. The Compass schools give sleeping directions per person, from the kua, or per house, from the chart; no school gives a universal rule about north. The magnetism claim has no evidence in either direction, and the bed placement guide says so under its evidence label. Head to the solid wall, door in view, feet out of the door’s line: the tradition’s bed is placed by the room, not by the pole.
The cures on sale
The seventh misconception says the practice needs objects, and the ledger above takes the objects one by one, because they are not all the same kind of thing and the trade sells them as if they were. Two of the seven are the tradition’s. The bagua mirror is a Taoist charm hung outside a door against a road, a ridge or a temple roof, which the mirrors guide gives and the neighbours guide warns about; it is real, exterior and never, in the older practice, an indoor object. The three-legged toad is a money charm out of the folk tale of Liu Hai, who fished the creature from a well with a string of coins, sold from the Qing on and kept on shop counters facing in; Smith’s survey of the late imperial charm trade has it, and it is a charm and not a rule about a house. The coins on red thread are the New Year’s cash tied in threes, a custom of the same trade that the manuals of siting do not mention. The other four are not Chinese. The crystals came into feng shui with the New Age of the 1980s, through the same American shops that sold both; the lucky bamboo is a Dracaena from Taiwan’s florists of the 1990s that was given the bamboo’s name and the bamboo’s sayings, which the planting guide gives for the real plant in the real garden; the indoor wind chime is a Western object, since the tradition’s bells hung at temple eaves against birds and spirits and never in a hall; and the wealth frogs, ships, fish and crystal trees are the shop goods of Hong Kong and Singapore from the 1980s on, which Emmons found on sale and Bruun found nowhere in the villages. The site’s reading of each is in the last column, and it is not a reading against ownership: a toad on a counter is a pleasure and a bamboo in a vase is a plant. It is a reading against the word cure, which the tradition kept for a wall, a screen, a tree, a pond or a door rehung, the things the remedies essay gives, every one of which changes what a house does and none of which is for sale in a gift shop.
How to tell
Three questions catch most of the twelve. Does the claim name a school, or does it say “feng shui says”? The tradition is several traditions, and a rule that belongs to none of them belongs to the press. Does it name a text, or a period, or a practitioner? Does it require buying something? A rule that fails all three is not necessarily wrong, but it is not feng shui, and it should be judged as what it is: a piece of advice about a room, to be tested against the room.