Learn · Essay · 12 min read · Updated September 2026

The schools of feng shui

Form, Compass and the Black Sect. Three ways of reading a house that agree on the bedroom and disagree about where your wealth corner is, explained so that you can tell which one a book is using. Where the two classical schools came from and who named them, what each reads and with what, the modern graft and its date, and a test for any page.

Oriented NW 315°

Metal

Fig. 01 A covered walkway drawn by its shadows. The Form School reads a site this way, by eye; the Compass School would take a bearing first.

“Feng shui” is one word for several practices that do not agree with one another. Most of the contradictions a reader meets come from this: a rule from one school stated in the voice of all of them. There are three main families, plus a modern habit of using the vocabulary without the cosmology. What each one looks at, what it asks you to do, where it came from, and how to recognise it on the page.

Two schools, named by their critics

The division into Form and Compass is older than the English words. The Chinese tradition spoke of the Jiangxi school and the Fujian school, after the provinces the two lineages were held to come from, and the names were fixed not by the practitioners but by the scholars who catalogued them: the editors of the great imperial library of the eighteenth century, the Siku Quanshu, sorting the siting books they had collected, described one school that read the shapes of hills and the courses of water, the xingshi or luantou school of Jiangxi, and another that read bearings, trigrams and stems and branches on the compass, the liqi school of Fujian, and noted with some asperity that the second had multiplied its rules past anyone’s ability to check them. Smith’s survey of the divinatory arts of the late empire and Bruun’s history both take the division from there. The Jiangxi school traced itself to Yang Yunsong, a Tang official of the ninth century who was said to have left the capital after the Huang Chao rebellion and taught siting in the hills of southern Jiangxi; the Fujian school traced itself to Wang Ji of the Song, and the compass masters after him. Neither ancestry can be verified, and both are what the schools believed of themselves.

Fig. 01 The schools as a table: what each reads, with what, what it gives, and since when. Form reads hills, water, roads and sight lines by eye and gives the site and the seat; it is the oldest layer and the one every other school assumes. Eight Mansions reads the sitting of the house and the birth year of the householder with an ordinary compass and gives four good and four bad directions. Flying Stars reads the facing and the date of building with a luopan and the almanac and gives a chart of nine numbers that changes by period. San He reads the hills and the water by bearing on the three-plate luopan and gives the water mouth and the dragon. The Black Sect reads the door and a wish, with no instrument, and gives nine life areas and a box of cures. The first row is tradition; the next three are schools of the Compass branch; the last is a graft, and the site’s labels follow the rows. The dates are the dates of the methods as practised, not of the texts they cite: Eight Mansions is Ming in its manuals and claims Tang ancestors, Flying Stars is Qing and claims the Song, San He is attributed to Yang Yunsong of the Tang, and the Black Sect was taught in the United States from the 1980s. A book that will not say which row it is on is on the last.

The matrix gives the schools as the site labels them: what each reads, with what instrument, what it gives, and since when. Form is the root and every other row assumes it. The three middle rows are branches of the Compass school, which is not one method but a family of them, and the last row is a graft from the 1980s that took the vocabulary and dropped the compass.

Form: reading by eye

Indoors, the Form school is the source of nearly everything that translates well. The command position of a bed or desk is the armchair in miniature. The dislike of sharp corners aimed at a chair, of a long corridor ending at a bedroom door, of a road running straight at a house, is form reading: what is exposed, what is sheltered, what is in the line of something. None of it needs a compass, and all of it can be checked by standing in the room.

Compass: reading by bearing

The methods are where the school divides. Eight Mansions (ba zhai) sorts people into an East and a West group from their birth year and gives each four favourable and four unfavourable directions; it can be worked without a full luopan and is the compass method most beginners meet, and its manuals are Ming though they claim the Tang. Flying Stars (xuan kong fei xing) plots the nine Lo Shu numbers onto a plan according to the facing direction and the twenty-year period of construction, and reads the result as a changing chart; its manuals are Qing and claim the Song. Behind these stand two broad lineages, San He (Three Harmonies), which reads hills and water by bearing on a luopan with three offset rings and is attributed to Yang Yunsong himself, and San Yuan (Three Cycles), which reads time as well as direction and is the home of Flying Stars. Skinner’s compendium describes them and practitioners argue about them at length; Feuchtwang’s analysis finds the two lineages using the same instrument to answer different questions.

Black Sect: reading from the door

The third family is modern. Thomas Lin Yun, teaching in the United States from the 1980s, re-founded the bagua: rather than orienting it by compass, his Black Sect Tantric Buddhist school (BTB, or Black Hat) lays the grid from the front door, so that the row containing the door is always knowledge, career and helpful people, and the far wall is always wealth, fame and relationships. Sarah Rossbach’s Feng Shui: The Chinese Art of Placement of 1983 carried the method into print, and it is the feng shui of most Western books. Bruun’s history places it: a practice made for people who had no compass, no Chinese and no hills, and who wanted an answer in an afternoon.

Fig. 02 One flat, two baguas. Left: the grid laid by compass, north up, as the Compass School does; the Xun sector, which the popular tradition calls wealth, is the south-east room. Right: the same grid laid from the front door, as the Black Sect school does; standing in the door and looking in, the far-left corner is wealth, and it is the south-west room. The two methods are not two answers to one question; they are two questions. The compass grid asks where a sector lies on the earth; the door grid asks where it lies in the experience of walking in. This is why two confident sources can put your wealth corner in different rooms, and why this site, when it lays the grid at all, lays it by the compass and says so.

The vocabulary without the cosmology

A fourth practice has no name and a great deal of influence. Designers, architects and writers use feng shui as a language for spatial relationships, the command position, the clear threshold, the balance of the five phases as a way of talking about materials, without committing to qi or the calendar. Most of this site’s own reading belongs here and is labelled as interpretation. It is honest so long as it does not borrow the tradition’s authority for claims the tradition never made.

Telling them apart

Fig. 03 The schools as a tree. At the root, the classical siting art of the Han and after, the practice the Zangshu describes. Two branches: Form, which reads landform by eye and gave the tradition the armchair and the four animals, and Compass, which reads bearings with the luopan and the trigrams. The Compass branch divides into its methods, San He, Eight Mansions and Xuan Kong, each with its text. Two late grafts, dashed: the Black Sect school of Lin Yun, which reached the United States in the 1980s and laid the bagua from the door, and the paperbacks of the 1980s and 1990s, which mixed all of the above and are the feng shui most readers meet. Dates are those of the best-known texts, not of first practice; the methods are older than their treatises. The site’s six claim labels follow the tree: a rule from the root or the two branches is tradition, one from a twig is school.

The tree is the test above drawn as descent. Anything that asks for hills, roads and sight lines is speaking from the Form branch; anything that asks for north is speaking from the Compass branch, and the twig it sits on is given away by what else it asks for, a birth year for Eight Mansions, a chart of nine numbers for Flying Stars, the twenty-four mountains alone for San He. Anything that lays the map from the door has come through the Black Sect graft, and anything that does all of these at once without saying so has come through the paperbacks. The site’s labels follow the tree: root and branches are tradition, twigs and grafts are school.

A short test for any book, page or consultant:

Are you asked to find north? If yes, compass. If the grid is laid from the door, BTB. If neither, form or interpretation.
Is there a number derived from your birth year? Eight Mansions.
Is there a chart of nine numbers that changes with the year? Flying Stars.
Are hills, roads, corners and sightlines discussed? Form, and the part most worth listening to.
Is an outcome promised? Then it is neither classical nor careful, whichever school it claims.

Where they agree

All three want the bed against a solid wall with the door in view; all three want the entrance clear and lit; all three dislike a bed under a beam, a desk with its back to the door and a mirror reflecting a sleeper. That overlap is the tradition’s practical core, and it is the part this site draws. The methodology explains how the schools are labelled throughout; the essays on the bagua and history say where each came from.