Chapter 9: A Survey of the Schools (V): Other Significant Branches

This chapter collects four systems that do not belong (or do not fully belong) to the genealogies described above, yet carry considerable influence in practice: the northern folk system of Jinsuo Yuguan; the auxiliary-star gua-flipping water method attached to the Sanhe school; the Purple-White Nine Stars that run through every school; and complementary techniques such as the pure-yin-pure-yang method and matching a burial to the deceased's fate, followed by a brief look at the date-selection system.

9.1 Jinsuo Yuguan (Guolu Yinyang)

Jinsuo Yuguan circulates through northern Jiangsu, southern Shandong, and eastern Henan; because its masters could judge a household's fortune at a single glance while passing by, it is popularly known as Guolu Yinyang ("passing-the-road yin-yang"). Its scriptures were transmitted among the common people in mnemonic verse, and have circulated more widely since being compiled and published in recent decades. This school's distinguishing feature is that it simplifies the principle-and-qi model to its barest extreme: it disregards the sitting-and-facing and the cyclical period, casts no star chart, and considers no life-gua—it looks only at the sand and water in the eight directions.

Its master rule matches the Luo Writing's numbers to the Later Heaven's eight palaces, and its rule of judgment is as terse as a command: directions one, two, three, and four need sand; directions six, seven, eight, and nine need water—that is, the four palaces Kan (1), Kun (2), Zhen (3), and Xun (4) should ideally show sand (something solid and elevated: a mountain, a building, a ridge) and should avoid water; the four palaces Qian (6), Dui (7), Gen (8), and Li (9) should ideally show water (something low and open: a river, a pond, a road, a hollow) and should avoid sand. A match is auspicious, a reversal is inauspicious. The specific point where fortune or misfortune lands is inferred according to the trigrams' human associations: for instance, the Kun palace governs the elder mother and the spleen and stomach, so if the Kun direction, which should show sand, instead shows water, this is judged to indicate illness for the lady of the house; the Qian palace governs the elder father and the head, so if the Qian direction, which should show water, instead shows a tall, oppressive sand-form, this is judged to indicate head ailments and litigation for the father—the scripture's enormous body of mnemonic verses of the form "sand in such-and-such direction" and "water in such-and-such direction" is simply this correspondence spelled out in full. Explanations of its rationale within the school mostly appeal to the mutual complementarity of the Earlier and Later Heaven trigrams with the yin-yang of the River Chart and Luo Writing (sand as yin and water as yang, so that the palaces of the yang numbers one through four should be matched with yin sand, and the reverse for six through nine), though accounts differ.

The strength of Jinsuo Yuguan lies in its extreme practicability: a judgment can be rendered at a single glance, its interpretive statements are concrete (pointing directly to which person, which illness, which matter), and its learning cost is low, giving it an extremely high market share in the villages of North China; in recent times it has also developed improved offshoots that incorporate the cyclical Period. The criticisms are equally obvious: the model has only a single dimension, "the eight directions times sand-or-water," so that any two houses with similar external configurations receive identical judgments regardless of anything else; the determination of what counts as sand or water (how high must something be to count as sand$1 does a road count as water$2) rests entirely on a master's personal experience of transmission; and the origin of its scriptures is unclear, with almost no genealogical connection to the classical principle-and-qi literature. It can be regarded as one pole of "minimalism" among principle-and-qi models—standing at the opposite extreme from Xuankong Great Gua's three hundred eighty-four lines.

To convey its flavor, a few of its interpretive statements are given here in free translation (paraphrased from the general sense of commonly circulated compilations, not quoted from any original text): sand obtained in the Kan direction (due north) indicates a capable middle son and a family business with firm support; a large body of water instead seen in the Kan direction indicates harm to the middle son and cold ailments of the ear and kidney. Sand obtained in the Kun direction (southwest) indicates a long-lived mother, a virtuous wife, and abundant land holdings; water seen in the Kun direction indicates illness for the mother, misfortune for the wife, and ailments of the spleen and stomach. Water obtained in the Li direction (due south) indicates cultural and examination success, and clarity of eye and mind; a tall, oppressive sand-form instead seen in the Li direction indicates ailments of the heart and eyes, and misfortune for the middle daughter. Water obtained in the Qian direction (northwest) indicates good health and long life for the father, with official honor to be hoped for; a massive sand-form seen in the Qian direction indicates head ailments, litigation, and misfortune for the father. Every one of the scripture's statements takes this same three-part form of "direction—sand-or-water—human affairs," mapping the Later Heaven trigrams' classification of the body and of family relations (Qian as the head, Kun as the belly, Qian as the father, Kun as the mother, and so on) directly onto its interpretive statements, in a tidy, image-rich phrasing well suited to oral transmission—this folk-song-like form of knowledge stands at the opposite pole of the principle-and-qi literary spectrum from the deliberately obscure cryptic language of the Tianyu Jing.

9.2 Auxiliary-Star Gua-Flipping and the Nine-Star Water Method

The auxiliary-star water method is a technique for taking in water attached to the Sanhe system, included in books such as the Dili Wujue; its mechanism is gua-flipping: taking the trigram belonging to the facing (some say the sitting mountain) as the starting point, the lines are changed one by one in sequence according to the gua-flipping palm formula, distributing the eight stars—Assistant-Forerunner, Military Fortune, Poison Army, Chastity Fault, Greedy Wolf, Giant Gate, Salary Preserver, and Literary Fortune (the Nine Stars, with Assistant and Forerunner counted as one)—across the eight trigram directions. The sequence of the flipping is fixed (starting from the original trigram as Assistant-Forerunner, the next flip yields Military Fortune, the next Poison Army, and so on through Chastity Fault, Greedy Wolf, Giant Gate, Salary Preserver, and Literary Fortune), and the direction each falls into is restored to a specific mountain according to the kanyu na-jia system—in this way, each of the eight directions of water is assigned its own star.

The rule of judgment: water arriving from the direction of any of the four auspicious stars—Greedy Wolf, Giant Gate, Military Fortune, and Assistant-Forerunner—is auspicious, indicating examination success, wealth, and flourishing descendants; water arriving from the direction of any of the four inauspicious stars—Poison Army, Chastity Fault, Salary Preserver, and Literary Fortune—is inauspicious, indicating ruin, loss of heirs, and dissipation or litigation; the auspicious-star directions should have water arriving and gathering, and the inauspicious-star directions should have water departing or no water at all. The weight given to each judgment is further tied to the pure-yin-pure-yang doctrine: a pure-yin facing taking in pure-yin water, and a pure-yang facing taking in pure-yang water, is considered pure and unmixed.

The technique of gua-flipping is itself a general-purpose piece of machinery within the principle-and-qi school: the Eight Mansions Roaming Years are, in fact, themselves a gua-flipping (line-change) system as well, and the Earlier-Heaven school, the auxiliary-star school, and the Heavenly-Father-Earthly-Mother hexagram school all distribute their stars by line-change—they differ only in which trigram they start flipping from and in what order the stars are assigned. Hence, in older texts, "the gua-flipping school" is sometimes listed as a separate branch of principle-and-qi in its own right. The practical tip for readers is this: whenever one encounters the phrase "Nine-Star water method," first determine whether it refers to the auxiliary-star gua-flipping method (the na-jia pure-yin-pure-yang system), the Sanhe Stage-of-Life system, or the Xuankong Flying Star system—the three share the same name but are entirely different in substance.

The traditional interpretive associations for the gua-flipped Nine-Star water method run roughly as follows: Greedy Wolf water indicates intelligence and literary talent, and success in the examinations; Giant Gate water indicates honesty, generosity, and prosperity in land and wealth; Military Fortune water indicates martial honor and resolve, flourishing in both wealth and descendants; Assistant-Forerunner water indicates modest prosperity and peace, with steady, lasting benefit—these are the four auspicious ones. Poison Army water indicates violence and strife, ruin, and bladed conflict; Chastity Fault water indicates fire, litigation, and calamities born of a fierce temperament; Salary Preserver water indicates solitude, widowhood, chronic illness, and the erosion of the family estate; Literary Fortune water indicates dissipation, wandering, gambling, and a ruined ambition—these are the four inauspicious ones. Accompanying these are further refinements, such as judging the purity or impurity of a facing's water according to pure yin and pure yang, and judging the weight of its influence according to whether the water arrives, departs, gathers, or disperses. One can see that this set of associations closely resembles the Eight Mansions school's eight Roaming-Year stars (which likewise use the Nine-Star names matched to fortune and misfortune)—the two systems are, in fact, different assemblies of the very same line-change machinery, yet further evidence that gua-flipping functions as a general-purpose technology within the principle-and-qi school.

9.3 The Purple-White Nine Stars: The Annual Flying Stars and the Timing of Selections

The Purple-White method distributes the Luo Writing's nine stars (One White, Two Black, Three Green, Four Emerald, Five Yellow, Six White, Seven Red, Eight White, and Nine Purple) across the nine palaces according to the year, month, day, and hour, and functions as a general-purpose temporal layer running through every school. The method for calculating the annual Purple-White: the star entering the center for each year is fixed according to the one-hundred-eighty-year Three-Cycles cycle (following the same convention as Xuankong: for instance, Three Green enters the center in 2024, a jiachen year; Two Black enters the center in 2025, a yisi year; and One White enters the center in 2026, a bingwu year); once in the center, the star flies forward through the eight directions, yielding the star occupying each palace for that year. The monthly, daily, and hourly Purple-White each have their own starting formula. The traditional literature treats the Zibai Jue (included within the Qing dynasty's officially commissioned Xieji Bianfang Shu system of date-selection literature) as its essential canon.

The Purple-White method has two uses. First, as a standalone practice: every year, in the first lunar month, popular and mass-media sources publish a chart of "the annual fortune of each direction"—the directions occupied by Five Yellow (the Grand Baleful Influence, to be avoided for groundbreaking), Two Black (the Sickness Talisman), and Three Green (disputes) should be kept quiet and neutralized, while the directions occupied by One White (romance and literary glory), Four Emerald (literary glory), and Six White, Eight White, and Nine Purple (wealth and joy) should be kept active and put to use—this annually changing directional almanac is powered precisely by the annual Purple-White chart. Second, as a timing device attached to other schools: Xuankong Flying Star overlays the annual Purple-White chart onto the base chart to judge the fortune of a given year (see 7.6), and practitioners of Eight Mansions and Sanhe likewise commonly borrow the Purple-White chart to fix the year and month for breaking ground or renovating. One might say that Purple-White is, in effect, the "shared calendar layer" of the principle-and-qi schools: however mutually exclusive the schools may be, when it comes to checking an almanac for Five Yellow or Two Black, they all use the very same set of stars.

For readers' convenience in casting their own chart, the common starting formulas for the annual and monthly Purple-White are appended here. The annual Purple-White: fixed according to the Three-Cycles ganzhi cycle—the jiazi year of the Upper Cycle (such as 1864) has One White enter the center, the jiazi year of the Middle Cycle (1924) has Four Emerald enter the center, and the jiazi year of the Lower Cycle (1984) has Seven Red enter the center; thereafter the star entering the center moves backward year by year (decreasing in sequence: nine, eight, seven...). A quick calculation formula (for the Gregorian year): repeatedly sum the digits of the year until a single digit n is obtained, then take 11 minus n (if the result exceeds 9, subtract 9 again); this gives the star entering the center for that year. Checking the method: for 2024, 2+0+2+4=8, and 11−8=3, so Three Green enters the center; for 2026, 2+0+2+6=10, 1+0=1, and 11−1=10, 10−9=1, so One White enters the center. The monthly Purple-White: fixed according to three groups of year-branches—for zi, wu, mao, and you years, the first lunar month has Eight White enter the center; for chen, xu, chou, and wei years, the first lunar month has Five Yellow enter the center; for yin, shen, si, and hai years, the first lunar month has Two Black enter the center; thereafter the star entering the center moves backward month by month. The daily and hourly Purple-White formulas are considerably more complex (divided into forward and backward cases before and after the winter and summer solstices), and in practice one generally consults an almanac. Once the entering star is fixed, flying it forward through the eight directions yields the annual or monthly star for each palace—the "Five Yellow arriving at Li in 2026" cited in the example in Section 7.6 comes precisely from One White entering the center and flying forward (center-1, Qian-2, Dui-3, Gen-4, Li-5...).

9.4 Pure Yin and Pure Yang, and Matching a Burial's Fate to the Occupant

The pure-yin-pure-yang method's assignment has already been explained in Section 3.5 (the twelve mountains taken in by the trigrams at the four cardinal points of the Earlier Heaven arrangement are pure yang, and the twelve mountains taken in by the trigrams at the four intercardinal points are pure yin); here, its practical application is filled out further. It is not, in itself, an independent school, but rather a complementary axiom invoked as a criterion by multiple systems: a yin dragon should be matched to a yin facing and take in yin water, a yang dragon should be matched to a yang facing and take in yang water, and any mixture of yin and yang is inauspicious. The Cuiguan Pian's celestial-star dragon method, the auxiliary-star water method, portions of the Sanhe transmission, and several formulas within Qiankun Guobao all use pure yin and pure yang as their underlying filter. Its conflict with the yin-yang of Xuankong's Three-Cycles dragons (two different systems of yin-yang applied to the very same mountain), already discussed above, is the very first point of collision whenever a case is jointly consulted across schools.

Matching a burial's fate to the occupant (matching the immortal's fate to the mountain) is the final step in yin-dwelling principle-and-qi practice: the deceased's birth-year stem-and-branch (the immortal's fate) is matched against the sitting mountain and the fen jin to argue generation, overcoming, clash, and harmony—common taboos include a clash between the immortal's fate's branch and the sitting mountain's branch (a person with a zi fate, for instance, should not be buried on a wu mountain), or the fen jin's na-yin overcoming the immortal fate's na-yin. The corresponding technique on the yang-dwelling side is the Eight Mansions matching of life-gua to house, and the avoidance of a clash between the occupant's year-fate and the year of construction or renovation. This whole family of "person-to-direction" matching techniques, scattered across the various schools, all continue the ancient Han-dynasty logic of the Five Tones and surname-suitability, "matching the person to the house"—across two thousand years, what has changed is the symbolic system (the Five Tones replaced by the stems, branches, and trigram cases), while what has remained constant is the underlying problem of "matching house to fate."

The most recent variant of this line of thinking, as applied to the contemporary property market, is matching one's fate to a floor level: using the River Chart's numbers, floors are assigned to the Five Phases (floors ending in 1 or 6 belong to water, 2 or 7 to fire, 3 or 8 to wood, 4 or 9 to metal, and 5 or 0 to earth, with floors above ten cycling by their final digit), which is then matched against the resident's zodiac animal or life-gua's Five Phase to argue generation and overcoming, yielding formulas such as "a person born in such-and-such a year should live on such-and-such a floor"—the doctrine of floor-level fortune circulating widely today in sales offices and home-lifestyle media rests, in its entirety, on this single table. It represents a live invention of the principle-and-qi symbolic system confronting a dimension—"the high-rise"—that had no place in the traditional model: the numbering of the River Chart is ancient, while fitting it onto floor levels is new—the two-thousand-year drama of the principle-and-qi school, "old symbols fitted to new objects," has been staged once again in the age of the elevator apartment building.

9.5 Date Selection and Principle-and-Qi: A Glimpse of the System for Choosing Auspicious Times

The choice of timing (date selection, zeri, zeji, xuanze)—for breaking ground, raising the ridgepole, installing a door, moving in, turning the first sod, or interring a burial—stands as the counterpart to directional principle-and-qi, and has always made up fully half of the fengshui trade in practice. Date selection forms its own great tradition (the Qing dynasty's thirty-six-volume Xieji Bianfang Shu is its great officially commissioned summa); only the branches most closely joined to principle-and-qi are noted here. The fate-forging method (zaoming fa) takes the four pillars formed by the year, month, day, and hour of a burial (or a groundbreaking) as a "forged" set of eight characters, requiring that they support and supplement the sitting mountain and the person concerned (whether benefiting the deceased's fate or the resident's own fate); Jiang Daihong's Tianyuan Wuge, in discussing date selection, advocates precisely this method, denouncing selection by baleful spirits as absurd. The Doushou Five Phases method, popular in Fujian and Guangdong, fixes the Doushou Five Phase from the facing and argues generation and overcoming by year and month. Folk lineages such as Master Dong's date selection and Wutu Taiyang each follow their own separate practice. The system of baleful spirits—Tai Sui, the Three Killings, Five Yellow, Wuji Dutian, and other directional deities—specify, for every year and every month, the directions in which construction and renovation must not be carried out, forming a shared "traffic code" observed across all the schools alike (for instance, the Tai Sui direction forbids breaking ground, the origin of the popular saying "one must not break ground upon the head of Tai Sui"). The relationship between date selection and principle-and-qi can be summed up in a single phrase: principle-and-qi fixes what is permissible "in space," while date selection fixes what is permissible "in time," and together the two form the complete system of permission governing traditional construction practice.

The textual culmination of the date-selection system is the thirty-six-volume Xieji Bianfang Shu, imperially commissioned during the Qianlong reign of the Qing: it was the state itself that undertook to sort through the baleful spirits of successive generations of date-selection literature, deleting those that contradicted one another and retaining those with sound basis, unifying the conventions of what was and was not permitted in the officially issued calendar (the huangli)—this was the largest project of "standardizing governance" ever applied to numerological knowledge in imperial China, and it also indirectly shows just how chaotic the system of baleful spirits had become beforehand. At the popular level, there is the tongshu (almanac) culture that continues to this day: the almanacs compiled and printed every year in Fujian and Guangdong (such as the local almanac-house imprints that have circulated for centuries) combine date selection, directional deities, Purple-White, and the Spring Ox and Mangshen figures into a single volume, and represent the primary vehicle through which principle-and-qi knowledge has permeated everyday life. The "auspicious and inauspicious" lines found in today's smartphone perpetual-calendar apps are simply the tail end of this chain of transmission running from the Xieji Bianfang Shu, through the tongshu, to the app—most of the principle-and-qi school's contemporary users are, in fact, consuming its output every day without any awareness of the system behind it at all. As this article's subject is directional principle-and-qi, the section on date selection is offered here only as a brief gesture, without further elaboration.