Questions people ask
Does it work, which way should the bed face, is my house bad, do I need a consultant, where is the wealth corner, can I do it in a rented flat, do the cures work, how do I find my facing direction, does the building’s age matter, is the balcony part of it, can it help me sell, are the air and the noise feng shui, which house were the rules written for, is it a religion, and where to start. Short answers, with the page that gives the long one.
Oriented E 081°
Wood
Fifteen questions, asked in every language the tradition has been translated into, and the answers the site gives. Each is short here and long on the page it points to. The order is the order in which people ask them: whether it works, then what to do, then what it is.
Does feng shui work?
Parts of it do, for reasons the tradition did not have. The command position, a solid wall behind and the door in view, is what the prospect and refuge research finds people choose when they can; the rules about dark bedrooms, opened windows and cleared floors match the sleep, air-quality and stress literature; the objections to beams, corners and roads at the door describe positions from which a body cannot stop watching. The rest, the compass methods, the cures, the promises about money and marriage, has no evidence for it and is not the kind of claim evidence could reach. The evidence page ranks what has been studied.
Which way should my bed face?
Toward the door, with a wall behind your head, and not in the door’s line. That is the whole of what the tradition is sure of, and it is a rule about the room, not the compass. The compass schools add a direction from your birth year, and the site explains it on the Eight Mansions page and labels it as one school’s; apply it after the room’s rule, never instead. The bed placement guide draws the room where the ideal is not available.
The drawing gives the four answers a search will return, in one room. The first is the tradition’s and the site’s. The second is the Eight Mansions school’s, a direction from the birth year, which is worth having only when the room’s rule is already met, since a bed turned to its lucky direction with its head under the window has been turned for a number against the room. The third, that the head should point north to lie along the earth’s magnetic field, is not in any classical text and is a modern gloss on the compass; no study has found that sleepers know which way they lie, and the claim is repeated because it sounds like physics. The fourth, the feet toward the door, is the one every school refuses, and every sleeper who has tried it.
Is my house bad?
Almost certainly not, and almost certainly it has a fault or two the tradition would name. The sha catalogue lists the eight that appear in every manual, and every one of them has a remedy of a metre or two: a screen, a plant, a curtain, a turned chair, a moved bed. A house the tradition would call bad is one whose faults cannot be interrupted, a bedroom under a flyover, a door at the end of a motorway, and those are rare and obvious. The choosing a home guide is for the reader still deciding.
Do I need a consultant?
Not for anything on this site. A consultant is worth paying for a compass reading of a whole house, a Flying Star chart, or a commercial premises, and worth paying only if they say which school they practise and do not promise an outcome. The test on the schools page tells the schools apart in five questions; a consultant who cannot answer them is selling the paperbacks back to you.
Where is the wealth corner?
In the Black Sect school, the far left corner from the door; in the compass schools, the south-east; in the classical texts, nowhere. The misconceptions page gives the history and the schools page the map. Whichever corner you choose, the tradition’s advice for it is the same as for every other: light, order, something alive, and nothing broken.
The drawing puts the three answers in one flat, and they land in three places. The Black Sect school lays its bagua from the door, whichever way the door faces, and the wealth corner is the far left as you come in; the compass schools lay the same trigrams by the needle and put wealth in the south-east, which in the flat drawn is the corner by the front door; the classical texts have no corner for money and say what they say about wealth about the door, the bright hall before it and the water that gathers there. Three schools, three corners, and the same room: which is the plainest demonstration the site can give that the corner belongs to the school and not to the flat.
Can I do it in a rented flat?
Yes, and most of it. Nothing in the tradition’s first rules needs a drill: the bed moves, the desk turns, a screen stands, a curtain hangs from a tension rod, a lamp plugs in, a plant is carried. The rented homes guide draws a flat done without a landlord’s permission, and the small apartments guide the studio.
Do the cures work?
A wind chime is a sound, a crystal is a prism, a mirror is a mirror and a toad is a toad. The cures belong to the Black Sect school and the popular trade, and the site labels them so and treats each as the object it is. Some of the objects do something ordinary and useful, a mirror widens a hall, a plant breaks a line, a lamp lights a corner; none of them does the thing the shop says. The art and objects guide gives the classical list, which is short.
How do I find my facing direction?
Stand inside the front door facing out, hold a compass level, take the reading three times and keep the one that repeats. The facing direction guide draws it, with the three cases that trip people, and the luopan page explains what the reading is then used for. Most readers will never need it; those who use the compass schools need it before anything else.
Does the building’s age matter?
Only to one school, and to that school entirely. The Flying Stars method divides time into periods of twenty years and reads a house by the period it was finished in, so that two identical flats built in 2003 and 2025 carry different charts; the Flying Stars essay explains how the chart is built and its tool builds one for any period and facing, and the worked reading shows one read against a plan. The Form school and the site’s room guides do not ask when a building was finished, and nothing about the bed, the desk or the door changes with the date. A reader who does not use the compass schools can leave the year alone; one who does needs the completion date before anything else, and the choosing a flat guide says where to find it.
Is the balcony part of it?
It is the part the tradition would look at first, because it is the flat’s court. Every house the manuals were written for had open ground in front of its hall, the bright hall, with water in it if the household could manage water, and the balcony is what a flat has kept of that; the garden essay gives the classical version and the outside page the balcony’s rules, which are the court’s at a small scale: something solid behind the seat, the view held, a plant taller than the rest, water in a bowl in front, the rail planted so that the street is kept out. A balcony is also what the air guide’s morning window opens onto, and a household that uses its balcony for the bins has given away the tradition’s best room.
Can feng shui help me sell?
It can help a buyer decide, which is the same thing from the other side. The selling guide gives what the research has measured of the tradition in a sale price, which is a great deal for a flat with a history and a little for a house number, and gives the six faults a buyer’s practitioner sees in the first ten minutes, all of which cost a screen and an afternoon to remove. What it cannot do is the shop’s claim, that an object by the door sells a house; no study has found one in a price, and the tradition’s own remedies were walls and beds, not coins. A seller who has read the room guides has done what a buyer’s practitioner would ask, and a house that still does not sell is priced wrong, which the tradition also knew.
Are the air and the noise feng shui?
They are what the tradition meant by qi and sha before the words were translated into energy. The manuals opened the windows in the morning, called the air of a shut room dead, disliked a road’s noise at the door and a bedroom on a street, and the air and quiet guides give what the tradition asked in the numbers a monitor reads, carbon dioxide in parts per million and noise in decibels, with the research’s lines drawn on them. The recovering at home guide gives what a window is worth to a patient in days. A reader who thinks feng shui is about an energy nobody can measure has not tried the two things the tradition was surest about, and both can be measured for the price of a meter.
Which house were the rules written for?
A walled courtyard house with its gate in the south-east corner and its hall along the north facing south, and the reader who does not know that misreads half the rules. The houses essay walks the courtyard house room by room and sets it beside the sky-well houses of the south, the ring houses of Fujian and the courts dug into the loess, and says what a modern flat kept of the plan, which is the sequence, and lost, which is the court. A rule in a manual about a gate is a rule about a gate, and a flat’s door onto a corridor is not one; the site reads every rule back to the room it was written for and keeps what transfers, which is the room’s arrangement, and lets go what does not, which is most of what the paperbacks call urgent.
Is feng shui a religion?
No, though it grew up beside several and was practised by their priests. It is a body of siting and building practice with a cosmology attached, yin and yang, the five phases, the trigrams, that it shares with Chinese medicine and the calendar. Needham placed it among the sciences of China and called it a pseudo-science; Feuchtwang analysed it as a system of thought; Bruun describes it as a practice that survives every change in what people believe about it. The history page tells the story and the beyond China page what it became elsewhere.
Where do I start?
Start from the question, not from the compass. The tree gives the site’s five most common questions and the three pages each leads to; the reading paths page gives longer routes, and the in a day guide gives the order of work for a reader who wants to do rather than read. The methodology page explains the six labels on every claim, which is the one thing worth knowing before reading anything else here.