Foreword

The immediate motive for writing this survey is a predicament that almost every reader of fengshui has run into: open any book on the subject and its author speaks with total conviction; lay two books from different schools side by side, and they routinely denounce each other as "false methods." The Eight Mansions school says a person of an East Four Life-Gua must not live in a West Four house; the Xuankong school says Eight Mansions is too crude to be trusted; the Sanhe school's water methods were condemned by Jiang Daihong as "the fallacies of the Pingsha Yuchi Jing"; and within Jiang's own lineage, six or seven further branches split off, each claiming to hold the authentic transmission. A reader who genuinely wants to understand fengshui often exhausts all patience on the single question of "which school should I believe."

This article does not intend to answer "which school should I believe." What it sets out to do is something else: to treat the more intricate and more contested of fengshui's two great traditions—the principle-and-qi (liqi) school—as a unified body of knowledge and lay it out systematically. We will trace its historical origins, take apart the shared theoretical chassis it draws on (yin-yang and the Five Phases, the River Chart and Luo Writing, the trigrams, the stems and branches, and the cyclical periods), introduce its core instrument, the compass, and then work through the operative systems of Eight Mansions, Sanhe, Xuankong Flying Star, and other major schools such as Xuankong Great Gua, Qiankun Guobao, and Jinsuo Yuguan (Metal Lock and Jade Pass). We will then use a hypothetical case to demonstrate how, for one and the same house, the different schools each render their judgment and where exactly their conclusions diverge, before returning finally to the theoretical roots of the inter-school disputes and to how contemporary scholarship views the field.

A word should be said in advance about this article's stance: this is a cultural survey, not a textbook for any single school, nor an apologia for any of them. Wherever a school's doctrine is discussed, the approach taken here is to "state its claims and note its controversies"—faithfully relaying its deductive logic and its claims of verified outcomes, while also flagging the doubts raised against it both within and outside its own tradition. Wherever a judgment of fortune or misfortune is at issue, this is presented purely as an account of doctrine, and constitutes no advice regarding any actual decision about dwelling or burial. Readers who intend to put any of this into practice should understand that what this article offers is a map, not a key.

The full text, across thirteen chapters plus a foreword and afterword, runs to roughly sixty thousand Chinese characters. Chapters One through Four form the book's "general discussion" (concepts, history, theory, instruments); Chapters Five through Nine form the "particular discussions" (surveys of individual schools); Chapters Ten and Eleven address the relations among the schools; Chapter Twelve is a bibliographic overview; and Chapter Thirteen offers a contemporary perspective. Each chapter stands reasonably independent of the others—readers already familiar with the basics may jump straight to whichever school's chapter interests them—but it is advisable to read at least the terminological conventions in Chapter One first, so as not to be tripped up by the vocabulary.