A Comprehensive Survey of the Fengshui Principle-and-Qi School
From historical origins, theoretical foundations, and the compass as core instrument, to the doctrines of Eight Mansions, Sanhe, Xuankong Flying Star, and other major schools—along with comparative case studies and inter-school debates—a panoramic survey of the principle-and-qi (liqi) tradition for advanced readers.
Chapter 12: A Bibliographic Survey
This chapter offers a summary bibliography of the major texts of the principle-and-qi school. The principle of selection: each text is either the founding scripture of a particular school, or a key node in the history of the tradition's transmission. For each work, the following are noted: its attribution, the scholarly judgment on its actual date of composition, the gist of its content, and its place within the map of the schools. One guiding remark should come first: the attributions of principle-and-qi texts are almost uniformly unreliable, and "traditionally attributed to so-and-so" should be taken as the default posture for reading any classical fengshui text whatsoever.
12.1 The Falsely Attributed Classics: The Principle-and-Qi School's "Five Scriptures"
The Qingnang Jing (Classic of the Green Satchel), traditionally attributed to Huang Shigong's transmission to Chisongzi (some say to Zhang Liang), a mere few hundred characters long, divided into three scrolls (Origination of Transformation, Mechanism of Transformation, and Completion of Transformation), discussing purely the principles of yin and yang as found in the River Chart and Luo Writing, with no operative content whatsoever. It does not appear in any bibliographic catalogue before the Song, and scholarly opinion generally holds it to be the work of a Ming- or Qing-dynasty author, its status having risen abruptly once Jiang Daihong placed it first in his Dili Bianzheng. It functions as the principle-and-qi school's "metaphysical charter": Heaven is exalted and Earth is lowly, yang is odd and yin is even, the five signs and the four-sevens (the River Chart and Luo Writing, and the twenty-eight lunar lodges)—every school draws its own philosophical license from this text.
The Qingnang Xu (Preface to the Green Satchel), traditionally attributed to Zeng Wenchan. Opening with the line "Master Yang, in his old age, studied male and female; the books of the world do not agree on this," it goes on to discuss the mating of male and female, the movement and stillness of the Golden Dragon, and the dragon arriving from the south to be observed from the north—the textual basis for most of the Xuankong schools' doctrines of "male and female" and "Zero and Proper" lies chiefly in this text. The line "the dragon spirit of the mountain must not descend into the water; the dragon spirit of the water must not ascend the mountain" also comes from here.
The Qingnang Aoyu (Mysterious Sayings of the Green Satchel), traditionally attributed to Yang Yunsong. The line "kun, ren, and yi—Giant Gate emerges from the head" is the wellspring of the entire controversy over the Xuankong star-shifting formula: the Flying Star school derives its substitute-trigram formula from it, while every other school reads it differently—a single line of scripture has sustained a dozen or more mutually exclusive "true formulas."
The Tianyu Jing (Jade Classic of Heaven), traditionally attributed to Yang Yunsong, with three inner chapters (some say further outer chapters as well). "The trigram of Jiangdong has always been auspicious; the eight spirits are but four. The trigram of Jiangxi arranges the dragon's position; the eight spirits are but two. The eight spirits north and south share a single trigram; the response, in the end, should never err"—the Three-Cycles schools regard this as the highest secret formula, and it is the single passage over which commentators through the ages have disputed most fiercely. The text, cryptic from start to finish, is the ultimate example of the "exegetical" character of principle-and-qi.
The Ducian Baozhao Jing (Precious Mirror Illuminating All under Heaven), traditionally attributed to Yang Yunsong, divided into upper, middle, and lower chapters, written in the form of long verse, discussing dragon, lair, and form together with the secret meaning of principle-and-qi—"if one does not know the mysterious secret formula, one will still turn the mountain dragon upside down and get it wrong," and so on. It stands as a companion text to the Tianyu Jing, and both are scriptures that every Xuankong school must annotate.
These five texts (the mainstream scholarly judgment on their date of composition holds that none is earlier than the Song, and the bulk of them may in fact date from the Ming or Qing) were locked into place as the core canon of the principle-and-qi school through Jiang Daihong's selection and compilation in the Dili Bianzheng—a later-compiled edition retroactively defining what counts as "scripture" is one of the most important facts in the intellectual history of principle-and-qi.
12.2 Song- and Yuan-Dynasty Works: The Cuiguan Pian and the Yuchi Jing
The Cuiguan Pian (Chapters for Hastening Office), traditionally attributed to Lai Wenjun of the Song, included in the numerological-arts category of the Siku Quanshu. Divided into four chapters assessing the dragon, the lair, the sand, and the water, it argues in mnemonic verse for the combination of the Twenty-Four Mountains' celestial stars (Tianhuang, Tianshi, Yangxuan, and the like) with directional Five-Phase generation and overcoming. The Siku abstract describes its "wording and intent as obscure and profound, much of it beyond comprehension," while confirming it to be a specialized work of the siting masters dating from the Song onward. In terms of doctrine, the Cuiguan Pian is the founding scripture of pure-yin-pure-yang and celestial-star principle-and-qi, and it is also a landmark text in principle-and-qi's deepening into the resolution of the Twenty-Four Mountains.
The Yuchi Jing (the Pingsha Yuchi Jing, Jade Ruler Classic), traditionally attributed to Liu Bingzhong of the Yuan with a commentary by Liu Ji of the Ming—both attributions are regarded by scholarship as false, the work actually originating with a Ming-dynasty practitioner. Using phrases such as "yi and bing meet and hasten toward xu," it establishes the framework of double-mountain sanhe and the Four Great Water Bureaus, and stands as the theoretical charter of the Sanhe school. It is at the same time the single most attacked book in the history of fengshui: Jiang Daihong's "Exposing the Fallacies of the Pingsha Yuchi Jing" charges it with perversity and misleading the world, while the Sanhe masters continue to honor it as their guiding standard to this day—the polarized reception of a single classic is itself a microcosm of the Sanhe-Xuankong conflict.
The same period should also see mention of the Lingcheng Jingyi (Essential Meaning of the Numinous City), traditionally attributed to He Pu (He Lingtong) of the Southern Tang, divided into two scrolls, "the chapter on form and qi" and "the chapter on principle-and-qi," which states plainly that "the universe has its great correlations, and the cyclical fortune of qi is what governs them"—placing the fortune of cyclical qi (the cycling of periods) alongside the configuration of mountains and rivers as joint governing principles, one of the earliest systematic statements of the doctrine of cyclical periods; it was included in the Siku Quanshu, though its abstract suspects it to be a work falsely attributed by a Ming-dynasty author. The Three-Cycles schools often cite this book as evidence that a tradition of cyclical-period learning existed "after Yang and Zeng, before Master Jiang"; its own question of authenticity remains subject to the same old problem that dogs the rest of the principle-and-qi classics.
12.3 Ming-Qing Practical Manuals: From the Yangzhai Shishu to the Shenshi Xuankong Xue
The Yangzhai Shishu (Ten Books on Yang Dwellings), compiled by Wang Junrong during the Wanli reign of the Ming. A compendium of ten sections (the house's exterior form, the house's interior form, the Great Roaming Years, the Nine Stars Piercing the Palaces, the formula for installing Yuankong hexagrams, opening gates and construction, date selection, and so on), it is a museum of Ming-dynasty yang-dwelling knowledge: form methods, Eight Mansions, baleful spirits, and date selection all laid out side by side, reflecting the "mixed assembly" state of the field before the boundaries between schools had hardened—its value as a historical source is extremely high.
The Bazhai Mingjing (Bright Mirror of the Eight Mansions), attributed to Yang Yunsong, compiled and published by the Daoist Ruoguan during the Qianlong reign of the Qing. The fixed canonical text of the Eight Mansions school, tidily organized, with the Roaming Years, the life-gua, the gate-master-stove method, and the drainage method all fully laid out.
The Yangzhai Sanyao and the Dili Wujue, both written by Zhao Jiufeng (Yucai) during the Qianlong reign of the Qing. The former discusses yang dwellings through the three essentials of gate, master bedroom, and stove; the latter discusses yin dwellings through the five formulas of dragon, lair, sand, water, and facing; both are illustrated with diagrams and tables and can be learned step by step, making them the most successful project of "textbook-ification" in the history of fengshui, and the single greatest contributor to how widely Sanhe and Eight Mansions knowledge spread from the Qing through the Republican era. Scholarly criticism (including attacks from the Xuankong masters, and its own coarse and simplified format) has not hindered its historical standing in terms of circulation.
The Shenshi Xuankong Xue (Master Shen's Study of Xuankong), the surviving manuscripts of Shen Zhurong, supplemented and organized by his son Shen Zumian and disciples such as Wang Zexian, published in its standard edition in the 1920s and 1930s. Its contents include the star-shifting starting formulas, the tables for casting the standard xia gua chart and the substitute-trigram star, annotations of the house judgments in the Yinyang Erzhai Luyan (the "Zhongshan house judgments"), and question-and-answer sessions among various masters. It is the founding compendium of the Xuankong Flying Star school, and a milestone in the going-public of principle-and-qi's secret formulas; its manner of composition—"reverse-deriving the formula from house judgments" (see 7.1)—is something readers must always keep in mind. Comparable Republican-era sources from the same period include You Xiyin and Rong Boyun's Erzhai Shiyan (within the Zhaiyun Xin'an system), and Tan Yangwu's works from both before and after his change of allegiance (Da Xuankong Loutou and Da Xuankong Shiyan from his earlier period, and the Xuankong Benyi after his conversion)—taken together, this body of Republican-era Shanghai publications forms a complete cross-section of the principle-and-qi school's passage from secret transmission into the modern publishing market.
12.4 The Tradition of Commentary and Exposure of Falsehood: The Genealogy of the Dili Bianzheng
The Dili Bianzheng, compiled and annotated by Jiang Daihong of the Qing, is the pivotal text of the principle-and-qi school: it fixed the canon of five scriptures (the first five texts listed in 12.1, with the standard edition ordering them as the Qingnang Jing, the Qingnang Xu, the Qingnang Aoyu, the Tianyu Jing, and the Ducian Baozhao Jing), established the paradigm for annotating them, and appended "Exposing the Fallacies of the Pingsha Yuchi Jing," opening the genre of the exposure-of-falsehood text. Jiang's commentary deliberately left gaps, which in turn touched off a competition of commentary among later generations, forming a vast genealogy of "Bianzheng studies"; to name the most significant: Zhang Xinyan's Dili Bianzheng Shu (interpreting the scriptures through the sixty-four hexagrams, the founding text of the Great Gua school), Wen Mingyuan's Dili Bianzheng Xujie (following the conventions of the Wuchang lineage), Zhu Xiaohe's Dili Bianzheng Bu, and Yin Yishao's Dili Jingyu (the spread of Bianzheng studies through the Xiang-Chu region)—and on, without interruption, into the fresh commentaries produced by each school after the Republican era. A single classic, a dozen or more mutually exclusive commentaries—the genealogy of "Bianzheng studies" is the finest available archive for studying the mechanism by which the principle-and-qi school produces its knowledge.
Jiang's own body of writing extends beyond the Dili Bianzheng. The Tianyuan Wuge (Five Songs of the Celestial Origin, written by Jiang Daihong, also called the Tianyuan Ge in five sections) treats the general principles, mountain dragons, water dragons, yang dwellings, and date selection in seven-character verse, and is a relatively plain-spoken introductory text within Jiang's teaching, its sections on yang dwellings and date selection (advocating the fate-forging method and denouncing selection by baleful spirits) circulating especially widely. The Shuilong Jing (Classic of the Water Dragon, an old text compiled and edited by Jiang Daihong) is devoted entirely to the flatland water method, treating water itself as the dragon, richly illustrated with diagrams, and stands as an important text for the fengshui of low-lying plain regions (the water country of Jiangsu and Zhejiang)—it is the finest specimen of how the principle-and-qi school adapted itself regionally, reading mountain dragons in hill country and substituting water for the dragon on the plain. Works such as the Gujing Ge, the Guihou Lu, and the Yangzhai Zhinan, some attributed to Jiang himself and others to his disciples, of uneven authenticity, form a ring of "satellite literature" clustered around Jiang's teaching. The common scholarly attitude is to treat "Jiang Daihong" likewise as a bibliographic coordinate rather than a simple author's name—following Yang Yunsong, the principle-and-qi school produced a second center of false attribution, with the mechanism of knowledge production unchanged from before.
One further note on the attitude of official bibliography is worth adding: the siting-of-houses-and-graves category within the numerological-arts section of the Siku Quanshu includes only a dozen or so works—the Zhaijing, the Zangshu, the Canglong Jing, the Yilong Jing, the Zangfa Daozhang, the Qingnang Xu (with the Aoyu appended), the Tianyu Jing, the Lingcheng Jingyi, the Cuiguan Pian, the Fawei Lun, and others—and its abstracts are frequently blunt about the question of authenticity for these works ("the old edition attributes it to so-and-so... it is likely a work falsely attributed"), and yet it still preserves them, on the grounds that "the practice has flourished for a long time, and the book is provisionally retained to preserve a record of this one school of thought"—preserved, but not believed was the Qing dynasty's official scholarly verdict on the fengshui literature, and this stance still has value as a reference point for readers today.
12.5 Modern Compilation and Suggested Order of Reading
On the side of modern compilation: critically collated and photo-reprinted editions of the various classics are scattered across the numerological-arts series published by various presses; academic studies of fengshui literature and general histories (such as the monographs on fengshui history and compass history produced within mainland Chinese scholarship since the 1990s, and overseas research in anthropology and the history of science and technology, detailed in Chapter Thirteen) supply the necessary critical framework for reading the classical texts. For readers hoping to work through the original texts systematically, this article suggests the following order, moving "from the shallow to the deep, from history to technique": first read a modern scholarly history of fengshui to establish a framework; next read the Yangzhai Shishu and the Dili Wujue to see the practical form these doctrines took in the Ming and Qing; then read the body of the Dili Bianzheng together with one or two of its commentaries, to get a feel for the dispute between cryptic classic and commentary; and only at the end take up a school-specific work such as the Shenshi Xuankong Xue or the Cuiguan Pian for deeper study. The order to be strictly avoided is precisely the most common order found in the marketplace—starting straight from a modern textbook of a single school—since what one gains from that approach is a pair of glasses already tinted by that school's own preconceptions, rather than the panoramic view this article hopes to offer.
Reading the original texts also requires watching for the pitfalls of edition. Commercially printed editions of classical numerological texts have always suffered from serious corruption and omission, and it is entirely normal for the same title to cover different books, or for a single book to circulate in multiple, divergent forms: the Bazhai Mingjing and the Yuchi Jing each have multiple reprint lineages whose content differs; the Shenshi Xuankong Xue has both an original edition and an expanded edition, differing in the content of their chapters; and electronic texts circulating online are even more often silently added to or cut down by present-day hands, without any note of the change. The safe approach is to prioritize photo-reprinted editions or critically collated editions that state their base text clearly, and to cross-read multiple versions of the same work; whenever one encounters phrases such as "secret manuscript," "internal-use material," or "an ancestrally handed-down copy," the default assumption should be that it is a recent production—in this field, the more ancient a text claims to be, the more recent its actual date of composition tends to be, and this rule of thumb proves remarkably reliable.