Chapter 6: A Survey of the Schools (II): The Sanhe School

If the Eight Mansions school rules the bookstores of the cities, the Sanhe school rules the countryside of the south. It is the most widely applied principle-and-qi system for yin dwellings (and, secondarily, yang dwellings) among the common people since the Ming and Qing, and its core is a calculative method centered on "water": from where the water comes, to where it goes, and at which direction it enters and exits determine the success or failure of a configuration. The compass's Heaven Plate seam needle and its double-mountain Five Phases were designed precisely for this school.

6.1 Origins and Transmission: False Attribution to Master Yang and the Dispute over the Yuchi Jing

The Sanhe masters consider themselves the direct heirs of Yang Yunsong, calling their method "the ancient method of Master Yang," but the general malady of false attribution afflicts this school with particular force. Its programmatic classic, the Yuchi Jing, is attributed to Liu Bingzhong of the Yuan (some say it is even earlier); with phrases such as "yi and bing meet and hasten toward xu; xin and ren converge and gather at chen," it establishes the framework of the Four Great Water Bureaus, and it circulated widely throughout the realm during the Ming and Qing. In the early Qing, Jiang Daihong wrote his "Exposing the Fallacies of the Pingsha Yuchi Jing," charging that it "falsely claims Master Yang's authorship, bringing calamity upon the world"—and the two sides have carried on a three-hundred-year war of words ever since. Setting the dispute over authenticity aside, from the standpoint of technical history, the elements of the Sanhe system—double mountains, the Stage-of-Life water method, na-yin fen jin—can already be found scattered through Song- and Yuan-dynasty sources, and were integrated into fixed form by the Ming. Zhao Jiufeng's Dili Wujue, written during the Qianlong reign of the Qing, organized the Sanhe method into a follow-the-chart textbook around the five key terms "dragon, lair, sand, water, facing," making it the most successful popularization of this school, and it remains the common introductory text for students of Sanhe today. Because of differences in transmission and region, the Sanhe school has further split into conventions such as the "Old Sanhe" and "New Sanhe" (which differ over the reference point from which the Stage of Life is cast, detailed in 6.4); the lineage of the Shrine to Master Yang in southern Jiangxi, and the practicing traditions of Fujian, Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, mostly take Sanhe as their base system.

6.2 The Double-Mountain Five Phases, the Four Great Bureaus, and the Twelve Stages of Life

The Sanhe school's system for assigning attributes to direction is the double-mountain Five Phases: on the Heaven Plate, the twenty-four mountains are paired up two by two into twelve groups (each centered on an earthly branch, paired with an adjoining stem or intercardinal trigram): ren-zi, gui-chou, gen-yin, jia-mao, yi-chen, xun-si, bing-wu, ding-wei, kun-shen, geng-you, xin-xu, and qian-hai. These twelve double-mountains are then further grouped, according to the sanhe (three-harmony) branch groupings, into four bureaus:

The temporal axis for calculation is the Twelve Stages of Life: Birth, Bathing, Cap-and-Girdle, Officialdom, Emperor's Prime, Decline, Illness, Death, Tomb, Cutoff, Gestation, and Nurture—a set of twelve stages borrowed from fate calculation's description of the life cycle, here laid out across the compass's directions. Take the Water Bureau as an example: Birth is at shen; moving forward (clockwise), Bathing falls at you, Cap-and-Girdle at xu, Officialdom at hai, Emperor's Prime at zi, Decline at chou, Illness at yin, Death at mao, Tomb at chen, Cutoff at si, Gestation at wu, and Nurture at wei. The Stage of Birth differs for each of the four Bureaus (as listed in the table above), so that the very same direction carries a different "stage of life" depending on which Bureau is in play—first fix the Bureau, only then judge fortune and misfortune is the iron rule of Sanhe calculation.

The Bureau is fixed by observing the water outlet: one observes the direction from which the water of a given configuration finally exits (the outgoing water outlet). If the water outlet is at chen (the yi-chen double-mountain), the Bureau is fixed as the Water Bureau according to "xin and ren converge and gather at chen"; a water outlet at xu fixes the Fire Bureau, at chou the Metal Bureau, and at wei the Wood Bureau. The imagery of the four formulas is that of "all waters returning to their storehouse"—the tomb-and-storehouse direction is water's final destination, and whichever storehouse the water outlet falls into determines which Bureau the entire configuration belongs to.

6.3 Adjusting the Sand: The Human Plate's Sand-Adjustment Method

The sand method within the Sanhe system is precisely the Human Plate sand-adjustment method already introduced in Chapter Four: the middle needle is used to determine the direction of a sand-peak, and its corresponding lodge-degree Five Phase is looked up (jiao is wood, kang is metal, di is earth, and so on—each lodge assigned a Five Phase according to its name, with the assignment of the sun and moon among the twenty-eight lodges varying somewhat by lineage), and this is matched against the sitting mountain's Five Phase to argue generation and overcoming—that which generates me, that which shares my phase, and that which I overcome are auspicious (life-qi sand, flourishing-qi sand, servant sand), while that which overcomes me and that which I generate are inauspicious (baleful sand, qi-draining sand). Within the overall Sanhe configuration, the sand method occupies a supporting role: the nobility of descendants and success in the examinations are generally attributed to the sand, while success or failure in wealth is attributed to the water. Take a small worked example: a sitting mountain of geng-you belongs to metal; a fine, upright peak is observed to the northeast, and measuring it with the Human Plate shows that its direction's lodge-degree belongs to earth—earth generates metal, making it life-qi sand, indicating success in the examinations and the favor of benefactors; if this same peak were instead located to the south, falling within a fire lodge's degree, then fire would overcome metal, making it baleful sand—no matter how fine the peak's shape, a Sanhe master would judge it to carry a baleful influence, requiring a screening hill in front or a change of facing to avoid it. "The very same mountain changes its entire fortune with a shift of direction"—the sand-adjustment method demonstrates this central tenet of the principle-and-qi school with the greatest immediacy.

6.4 Taking In the Water: Casting the Stage of Life from the Facing, and the Fortune of Incoming and Outgoing Water

The water method is the heart of the Sanhe school. Its complete logical chain runs: observe the water outlet → fix the four Bureaus → cast the Stage of Life → match to the sitting-and-facing → argue incoming and outgoing.

The reference point from which the Stage of Life is cast is precisely the watershed between the Old and New conventions within the Sanhe school itself. The old method casts the twelve stages from the Bureau to which the dragon (or the sitting mountain) belongs; the new method, in the Dili Wujue lineage, instead casts the Stage of Life from the facing (hence called "the method that works from the facing")—once the facing has been fixed, the double-mountain to which the facing belongs determines the Bureau, and the twelve stages are then laid out clockwise across the twenty-four directions, after which the incoming and outgoing water are checked against whichever stage they fall into. The commonly followed rule for judging fortune and misfortune:

• Incoming water (water arriving before the site) should fall into the stages of Birth, Emperor's Prime, Officialdom, Cap-and-Girdle, or Nurture—"birth-and-flourishing water" arriving is held to bring prosperity, while water arriving at the stages of Decline, Illness, Death, or Cutoff is held to bring ruin; water at the Bathing stage is "peach-blossom water," and its arrival indicates dissipation and licentiousness.
• Outgoing water (water departing the site) should exit through the Tomb, Cutoff, or Gestation directions—the "storehouse mouth" gathering in all the water from its source; water departing through a birth-or-flourishing direction is "breaching the birth-and-flourishing," and indicates swift ruin.
• From this arise the classic configurations: the Correct Birth Facing (the facing occupies the Birth stage, favoring the arrival of Emperor's Prime water and a tomb-storehouse water outlet, the so-called "Birth arriving to meet Flourishing"), the Correct Flourishing Facing (the facing occupies Emperor's Prime, favoring the arrival of Birth water, "Flourishing departing to welcome Birth"), the Correct Tomb Facing, and the Correct Nurture Facing (with variant configurations that borrow the storehouse for outgoing water, such as the self-birth facing and self-flourishing facing, attached to these). The Sanhe masters' pursuit is the complete configuration in which the dragon, the water, and the facing all belong to the same Bureau together (the "three pearls of dragon, water, and facing").

Expanding the fortune and misfortune of incoming and outgoing water for all twelve stages into a table (following the common convention of the Dili Wujue lineage's facing-based water method; details vary slightly among different texts, and the wording of the associations diverges even more, so the table below presents the general outline):

Traditionally, the twelve stages are also matched to alternate Nine-Star names (Birth matched to Greedy Wolf, Bathing to Literary Fortune, and so on), compiled into water-method mnemonic verses beginning with lines such as "first, Birth water arrives at the hall"—the versions of these verses differ considerably from text to text, and students need only take the fortune or misfortune of each stage as the main thread, without becoming fixated on the star names themselves.

Beyond the water method, the Sanhe school also has a well-known system of taboos—the Yellow Springs Baleful Influence (huangquan sha). The Eight-Directions Yellow Springs formula states: "Geng and ding with kun above is the Yellow Springs; yi and bing must guard against xun water arriving first; jia and gui facings fear seeing gen; xin and ren's watercourse dreads facing qian." This means that if one sets a geng or ding facing and water arrives (or departs) from the kun direction, or sets a yi or bing facing and water appears at the xun direction, and so on, this incurs the Yellow Springs, indicating great misfortune. But the schools differ considerably over exactly which arrivals and departures of water in this configuration are inauspicious, and there is also a doctrine of "the Yellow Springs that rescues the poor"—by which the very same water in the same direction, if it harmonizes with the overall configuration, can turn a baleful influence into a source of power, indicating instead swift prosperity. The coexistence of a taboo alongside its own exemption clauses leaves ample room for flexible interpretation in practice; critics point to precisely this as evidence of the system's arbitrariness.

6.5 A Worked Example: The Sanhe Derivation for a Wood-Bureau Configuration

Suppose a burial site is being selected at a certain location (the same logic applies to a yang dwelling, substituting the residential compound's water outlet and road directions). Standing at the site and observing the water, all the streams converge to the front-left and finally exit at the ding-wei direction. Following "the metal ram takes in the spirit of gui and jia," with the water outlet at wei, the Bureau is fixed as the Wood Bureau—Birth at hai, Emperor's Prime at mao, and the tomb-storehouse at wei.

Next, examine the incoming dragon: the dragon enters from the qian-hai direction; the qian-hai double-mountain belongs precisely to the Wood Bureau, so the dragon and the water share the same Bureau—a match.

Now fix the facing: take sitting you, facing mao (the geng-you double-mountain, facing jia-mao)—the facing occupies the Wood Bureau's Emperor's Prime, making it a Correct Flourishing Facing. Casting the Stage of Life from the facing and checking against the water's course: the incoming water winds in from the qian-hai direction; hai is the Birth stage, precisely matching "Flourishing departing to welcome Birth" (setting a flourishing facing while taking in birth water); the outgoing water exits through the ding-wei tomb-storehouse, the storehouse mouth gathering the water in—a matched configuration. Checking the sand with the Human Plate: the sitting mountain geng-you belongs to metal; if a fine, upright peak stands to the southeast at a wood-lodge degree, metal overcoming wood makes it servant sand, indicating wealth; if a looming, oppressive peak stands to the south at a fire-lodge degree, fire overcoming metal makes it baleful sand, requiring trimming or avoidance. With the dragon, water, and facing thus forming the three pearls together, a Sanhe master would judge this a highly auspicious configuration bringing prosperity in both descendants and wealth, with the gain falling to the eldest branch (since the Birth-direction water arrives, indicating the eldest branch's prosperity).

Counter-example: if, for this very same landscape, one instead set sitting mao, facing you, the facing would belong to the Metal Bureau (xun-si, geng-you, gui-chou); casting the Stage of Life from the facing would put Birth at si and Emperor's Prime at you—yet the actual water outlet is at wei, which within the Metal Bureau is the "Decline" direction for the water to exit, not the storehouse mouth; and the incoming water from qian-hai would fall into the Metal Bureau's "Illness" stage, so that instead of taking in birth-and-flourishing water, the site would be taking in illness water—a Sanhe master would judge this a configuration of ruin. The very same mountains and water, with only the facing shifted by a hair's breadth, yield judgments as far apart as heaven and earth—this is the full weight carried by the single formula of "the facing" within the Sanhe school.

6.6 Brief Assessment and Principal Criticisms

The strength of the Sanhe school lies in how tightly it is bound to the actual landscape: all of its variables (dragon, sand, water, facing) are physically existing landforms; although its calculation uses symbols, it always comes to rest among real mountains and waters, and for this reason it is the most readily applicable system in the practice of yin-dwelling siting among the hills and waterways of the south, and also the easiest to transmit from master to disciple. The systematic, textbook-like organization of the Dili Wujue has further made it the most widely propagated principle-and-qi system since the Qing dynasty.

Criticism of it comes from three directions. The harshest criticism comes from the Xuankong masters: Jiang Daihong denounced the double-mountain Five Phases and the facing-based Stage of Life as "a false method," charging that it mechanically transplants the twelve stages of fate calculation onto direction, with no basis in the principles of the Yijing whatsoever; and the Sanhe school has no temporal dimension at all—the fortune of a single configuration never changes across a hundred years, and it cannot account for the rise and fall that comes with the turning of the cyclical periods. Criticism from within the school itself concerns its split conventions: the old and new methods differ over the reference point for casting the Stage of Life, and the very same configuration can be judged in opposite ways depending on which is followed; the taboo of the Yellow Springs Baleful Influence coexists with its own exemptions, giving excessive flexibility to how a judgment is rendered. Criticism from modern researchers points instead to its applicability to yang dwellings: the Sanhe school presupposes real mountains and real water, and when transplanted to the urban yang dwelling it can only substitute "the road for water, the building for sand"—with each further link in this chain of analogy growing looser, the model's input variables end up, in practice, no longer strictly definable at all. In fairness, the Sanhe school is, among all the principle-and-qi schools, the one with the strongest flavor of actual geography—its problem lies not in any detachment from mountains and water, but in whether the yoke of stems and branches it fastens onto that mountain and water truly has the rational basis it claims.