Chapter 8: A Survey of the Schools (IV): Other Methods within the Three-Cycles Family

"Three-Cycles" (sanyuan) serves as the general name for principle-and-qi systems that adopt the cyclical-period temporal framework. Xuankong Flying Star is merely the most widely circulated branch within the Three-Cycles family; alongside it stand several further schools that likewise claim to hold the authentic transmission of Jiang Daihong (or even of Master Yang), yet whose operative systems differ dramatically. This chapter surveys the most significant of these—their very existence is the best footnote to the three-hundred-year unsolved question of "what exactly was Master Jiang's true formula."

8.1 Xuankong Great Gua (the Sixty-Four-Hexagram School)

During the Daoguang reign, Zhang Xinyan wrote the Dili Bianzheng Shu, interpreting the classics directly through the Earlier Heaven sixty-four hexagrams, beyond the five scriptures annotated by Jiang—this is the public point of origin for the Xuankong Great Gua school (within the school itself, its origin is instead traced to a secret line of transmission among Jiang's own disciples). The core of its method is to upgrade the directional coordinate system from the Twenty-Four Mountains to the sixty-four hexagrams: the sixty-four hexagrams are arrayed around the compass's outer ring in the Earlier Heaven trigram sequence, each hexagram occupying five and five-eighths degrees (360 ÷ 64), and each hexagram is further divided into its six lines, giving three hundred eighty-four lines across the whole chart in all—a resolution unmatched by any other school.

Its main operative elements are four. Hexagram Period: each of the sixty-four hexagrams is assigned its own Period (one of the nine periods, derived from the Yijing's parent hexagrams and the Jiangdong-Jiangxi-Nanbei hexagram-group system) according to its line structure; the facing is set to whichever hexagram is currently in its Period, called "gathering the mountain and expelling the baleful influence, riding the timing." Matched generation and completion: the hexagram numbers (following the River Chart's one-six, two-seven, three-eight, and four-nine pairings) of the sitting-and-facing and of the dragon-and-water are matched to be auspicious. Matched to ten: two hexagrams whose numbers sum to ten are auspicious. Drawing a line to change the image: line-change is used to establish relationships between different hexagrams, working toward the auspiciousness of "a single pure and unmixed hexagram." Its temporal framework uses the Two Cycles and Eight Periods: the one hundred eighty years are divided into an Upper and a Lower Cycle, with each of the eight trigrams governing one Period, the number of years calculated from its lines (a yang line counting nine years, a yin line counting six years), which does not run in sync with the Flying Star school's Three Cycles and Nine Periods—the two schools' determinations of "which Period we are currently in" are thus offset from one another, and their conclusions naturally diverge.

Because of its strong Yijing-scholarly coloring and its extremely fine graduation, the Great Gua school has, among all the principle-and-qi schools, the most pronounced air of "genuine scholarship," and it has many practitioners in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Critics, however, take direct aim at the illusory nature of its resolution: each line spans less than a single degree, far exceeding both the practical precision of an actual compass reading and the physical certainty with which a building's orientation can be fixed, so that "determining fortune by three hundred eighty-four lines" amounts, in operative terms, to something close to arbitrary discretion; and different lineages also differ over how the hexagram Periods are calculated. The Flying Star and Great Gua schools each denounce the other as false while both claiming Jiang's transmission—this is the main battlefield of the civil war within Xuankong.

To give the reader a concrete sense of Great Gua's operative method, its deductive skeleton can be sketched briefly: fixing the facing no longer asks "which mountain, which facing," but rather asks onto which hexagram and which line of the sixty-four hexagrams the sitting-and-facing line falls. Taking the hexagram currently in its Period (a hexagram whose Period matches the current time) as the facing is the first principle; next, one checks which hexagrams the four major elements—the incoming dragon, the sitting mountain, the facing, and the water outlet—fall into, requiring that they be mutually matched in generation and completion, matched to ten, or belong to the same parent-hexagram group (the classification into the Jiangdong, Jiangxi, and Nanbei hexagram groups), a condition called the dragon, facing, and water all three being in accord; a further, deeper layer uses drawing a line to change the image: where a given hexagram does not match, one examines which hexagram it can be connected to by changing a particular line, establishing kinship between hexagrams through line-change, working toward a configuration of "a single pure and unmixed hexagram." The fen jin is then fixed directly at the level of the individual line. The whole logic substitutes the algebraic relations of the Yijing's hexagrams (generation and completion, matching to ten, line-change, and hexagram Period) for the Flying Star school's Luo-Writing kinematics—confronting the very same proposition of "matching space and time," the two schools have produced two entirely different mathematics.

8.2 Qiankun Guobao (Longmen Baju)

Qiankun Guobao, also called Longmen Baju (the Dragon Gate's Eight Bureaus) or the Three-Cycles Water Method, is attributed to transmission from ancient sages, though its actual origin cannot be traced; it circulated in Fujian and Guangdong during the Ming and Qing, and flourished greatly in Taiwan during the twentieth century, becoming one of the mainstream methods among practicing fengshui masters there. Its system takes the trigram of the sitting mountain as its origin point, assigning fixed names to the water in the eight surrounding directions according to the relationship between the Earlier and Later Heaven trigrams:

• The Earlier Heaven position: the direction occupied by the sitting mountain's trigram in the Earlier Heaven arrangement—water arriving from this direction flourishes descendants;
• The Later Heaven position: the direction occupied by the sitting mountain's trigram in the Later Heaven arrangement—water arriving from this direction flourishes wife and wealth;
• The Heaven-Robbery, Earth-Punishment, and Case-Robbery positions: the three inauspicious directions at and flanking the facing (collectively called "the three-bladed case")—the Heaven-Robbery direction most dreads incoming water, indicating misfortune and calamity;
• The Guest and Visitor positions: water arriving from these directions is said to benefit daughters, sons-in-law, and relatives of other surnames, but not the household's own male descendants;
• The Auxiliary Hexagram position: an assisting direction, where incoming water is likewise auspicious;
• The Storehouse-Pond position: the direction where wealth gathers; still water, such as a pond, should ideally be seen here, indicating hidden wealth;
• The Proper Aperture position (the Central Heaven position): the configuration's proper water outlet—water must exit through this direction, called "passing through the Central Heaven"; if the water exits through the wrong direction, the entire configuration is invalidated.

The gist of its judgments can be summarized: "When Earlier Heaven water arrives at the hall, descendants flourish; when Later Heaven water faces the hall, wealth flourishes; when Guest and Visitor water faces the hall, it brings prosperity to daughters and relatives of other surnames; the water of the Heaven-Robbery direction is most inauspicious of all, and this direction most dreads water thrusting toward it." The entire process of inference revolves around "from which direction does the water arrive, and to which direction does it depart"; it does not cast a star chart or discuss flying distribution, and its operation is intuitive—a single compass and a single Eight-Bureaus diagram suffice to apply it—and this is an important reason for its popularity among practitioners. Criticism centers on the following: the Earlier-and-Later-Heaven-trigram rationale behind the names of the Eight Bureaus feels forced (why the Earlier Heaven position governs descendants and the Later Heaven position governs wealth is asserted by convention rather than derived); different manuscript copies occasionally differ in how they list the directions for each Bureau; and its conclusions often clash with those of the Flying Star and Great Gua schools, which likewise belong to the Three-Cycles family, applied to the very same configuration—all three schools claim to be the true orthodoxy of the Three Cycles, producing precisely a three-way standoff of mutual exclusion.

8.3 Xuankong Liu Fa and the Xiezi Method

Xuankong Liu Fa ("the Six Methods") took shape in the Republican era: Tan Yangwu, renowned in his early years for the Wuchang lineage's Flying Star method, publicly declared around 1929 that his earlier learning was not authentic, and instead began transmitting the "Six Methods" that he claimed to have received from the Daoist master Li Qianxu, writing the Xuankong Benyi. The so-called Six Methods are the six rubrics of Xuankong, Male-and-Female, Golden Dragon, Star-Shifting, City Gate, and Tai Sui: "Xuankong" discusses the two qi of Zero and Proper (the current Period's trigram is the Proper Spirit and a fallen-out-of-favor Period is the Zero Spirit; the Proper Spirit's direction should be solid, and the Zero Spirit's direction should have water—the so-called "install the Proper Spirit in its proper position, and channel the water into the Zero Hall"); "Male-and-Female" discusses the mating of mountain and water; "Golden Dragon" discusses the point at which qi is active (determined, under the Two Cycles and Eight Periods, by taking the hexagram and line currently in its Period as active); its "Star-Shifting" follows a separate formula, entirely different from the Shen lineage's Flying Star method; "City Gate" discusses borrowing qi at the water outlet; and "Tai Sui" discusses the timing of an outcome. Liu Fa uses the Two Cycles and Eight Periods, emphasizing "Zero and Proper" over the star chart, and forms its own distinct style. Because of the dramatic gesture of Tan's public recantation of his earlier teaching, this school has, from its very founding, carried a polemical posture of "Flying Star is not the true formula"—to which critics retort: how can one know that what came later is the true one$1 The Liu Fa system's texts are terse and its meaning obscure, and its transmission has likewise split into several branches, with conventions that are just as inconsistent as elsewhere.

The most distinctive and most widely circulated concept within Liu Fa is that of the Zero Spirit and the Proper Spirit (ling zheng). Its principle: the direction occupied by the trigram-qi of the current Period is the Proper Spirit; the Proper Spirit's direction should be elevated and solid, favoring a mountain, and kept quiet—called "install the Proper Spirit in its proper position." The direction opposite the Proper Spirit (out of favor for the current Period, but matched to ten with it) is the Zero Spirit; the Zero Spirit's direction should be low-lying and open, favoring water, and active—called "channel the water into the Zero Hall." Flourishing qi should sit on solid ground, while a declining direction should show water—water in the Zero Spirit's direction, instead, indicates a great flourishing of the source of wealth. The concept of Zero and Proper is not unique to Liu Fa; the Shen lineage's Flying Star school likewise discusses Zero and Proper (calculated according to the Three Cycles and Nine Periods: for instance, in Period Eight, the Proper Spirit is at Gen and the Zero Spirit at Kun, so the common judgment for Period Eight is that "water seen in the southwest flourishes wealth"; in Period Nine, the Proper Spirit is at Li and the Zero Spirit at Kan, so the south should be solid and the north should have water)—but because the two schools use different Period systems (Three Cycles and Nine Periods versus Two Cycles and Eight Periods), the Zero and Proper directions derived for the very same year can differ between them—"Zero and Proper" thus also becomes a touchstone for testing the divergence between the schools' different Period systems.

The name Xiezi Fa ("the method of that tiny bit") derives from a tradition of cryptic verse in Jiang Daihong's own writing—lines such as "once one grasps the mysterious principle of yin and yang, and knows its decline and flourishing, its life and death... heaven overturned and earth upended, matched yet never the same—the secret of it all lies within Xuankong"—and Zhang Zhongshan of the Wuchang school himself spoke of "the tiny bit of yin and yang" (yinyang xiezi); "xiezi" means precisely that one small point of hidden mechanism. Later practitioners known for "the Xiezi method" mostly refer to a flexible practice unbound by any fixed chart, moving instead with the moment and the timing: wherever the current Period's qi is active, stirring it brings good fortune, and wherever it is out of favor, stirring it brings misfortune—"once the tiny bit accords with the mechanism of Heaven, every house can prosper." Because its very definition is characterized by "having no fixed form," the content of the Xiezi method as transmitted by different masters varies enormously, and outsiders have no way to verify how far these versions agree or differ—it is better understood as a legendary name draped over the Wuchang school's reputation for accurate judgment than as a definite, surveyable system. This article records it here for reference only.

8.4 Differences in Convention within the Three-Cycles Family

Viewing this chapter together with Chapter Seven, the disagreements within the Three-Cycles family can be organized into four layers: differences in coordinate system—the Twenty-Four Mountains (Flying Star) versus the sixty-four hexagrams (Great Gua) versus the Eight-Bureaus directions (Qiankun Guobao); differences in the Period system—the Three Cycles and Nine Periods versus the Two Cycles and Eight Periods, with the years marking a change of Period offset between them, so that the very same year can fall under different Periods for the two systems; differences in the operative core—casting and flying a chart (Flying Star) versus taking hexagrams matched by number (Great Gua) versus fixing the facing and observing the water (Qiankun Guobao) versus installing hexagrams by Zero and Proper (Liu Fa); and differences in the criterion of judgment—flourishing-or-decline arriving at a palace (Flying Star) versus the purity or impurity and generation-and-completion of a hexagram (Great Gua) versus Earlier-and-Later-Heaven water arriving at the hall (Qiankun Guobao). All four layers differ completely across these schools, and yet all four alike revere Jiang Daihong and annotate the very same Dili Bianzheng—the irony this situation casts on the "classic-and-commentary" tradition of knowledge is left for the reader to savor. The practical takeaway for readers is this: whenever the term "Three-Cycles fengshui" appears in the marketplace, one must always ask which particular branch is meant—the term "Three-Cycles" by itself designates no single, determinate operative system at all.