This page lived on my old English site for years. Every answer opened with “Feng Shui is …” and the whole thing read like it had been copied out of a reference book. I have rewritten it. Not because the old version was wrong, but because I have never once said any of it out loud in that shape.
The same handful of questions, over and over.
What does Feng Shui actually do
It reads land, and it reads buildings. Which way the ground falls matters more than people expect. So does where the water leaves the block, which in Sydney usually means the neighbour’s fence line. It was never only for houses either. Temples, academies, shopfronts, inns: anything meant to stand for a long time had someone look at it first. The practitioner works from whichever school he was trained in and from the terrain in front of him, sets the sitting and facing with a compass, and picks dates for breaking ground, for burial, for moving in.
Yang Zhai and Yin Zhai
Yang Zhai (陽宅) is the easy half: the client lives in the place and usually has some sense already of what is wrong with it. It takes in more than the four walls: the road and the drainage outside, which side the main entrance sits on, where you go once you are through the door, where the stove is, how the beds are placed, who sits facing which way in an office. If there is an altar, the altar too. It concerns the people who live in that house and nobody else.
Yin Zhai (陰宅) is choosing where to bury someone. The run of the ranges, the coming and going of water, where the point sits, how deep it goes, and a date set against the deceased and the descendants both.
That branch traditionally does not get written down. The teacher says it, you remember it, and if you don’t remember you ask again. Family is no exception; without formal initiation nobody teaches you. The stated reason is that a grave is held to bear on an entire line of descent, so the responsibility is heavy and a half-trained hand does damage. The second reason is plainer: very few people are willing to put in the work. Yin Zhai reads the ground at a depth Yang Zhai never asks for, the books do not carry enough of it, and someone has to walk you through the hills, trip after trip. There is no fast version of that, and not many people want to spend the years.
In Sydney there is a third reason that has nothing to do with transmission. Burial ground here is scarce, plots in the public cemeteries are hard to get and dearer every year, and Chinese families have largely moved from burial to cremation. There is not a great deal to say about dragon veins and water courses when the site in question is a niche in a columbarium wall. So the craft has far less to do in Australia than it had at home. The old line says only someone who can read burial ground counts as a true geomancer; hardly anybody minds about that now.
Is it a science
No.
You cannot falsify it. There is no experiment where you put one set of families in good houses and another in bad ones and come back years later to count. Far too many variables, and it would be a foul thing to do to people in any case.
Colleagues who reach for magnetic fields and energy frequencies are doing marketing, and I have stopped arguing with them about it.
What the craft runs on is two things stirred together. One is experience, several thousand years of people living indoors and noticing which arrangements wear on them and which don’t. The other is a philosophical position about people and their surroundings being of a piece, plus the reasoning apparatus of the Yi Jing. The formulas came out of that mixture and carry the marks of both. Joinery isn’t a science either.
What happens on the day
I walk the outside first. Where the ground rises and falls, where water arrives and where it leaves, what is next door, how the road runs past, which way the entrance is turned. Then indoors, compass out, room by room: door, stove, beds, plumbing, stairs, wherever the bathroom ended up. The compass gets pulled out of my bag at airport security every single time, by the way.
Most of the older brick houses here have been extended out the back, and the kitchen has usually moved into the new part. Circulation and daylight then have nothing to do with what the original plan intended. Walk in cold and the house presents as a catalogue of faults. Most of the time the fault is that the extension was done badly, not that the house has bad Feng Shui. Separating those two saves clients real money.
Two hours or so, longer if the house is big or has been added to more than once. The report comes a few days later: what the problems are, what can be changed, what can’t be changed and has to be lived around.
What counts as an adjustment
Whatever the reading turns into in practice. Move the furniture. Turn the bed. Change where people walk. Block one doorway and open another. Take out a water feature, or put one in. Colour and material on a particular wall. Most of it costs effort rather than money.
Colour and material I have never fully worked out. The formulas are precise on the point — this direction takes this phase, this phase takes this colour — and I read them the way I was taught. Ask me to explain why repainting one wall changes how a person feels in a room and I cannot. I suspect a fair part of it is suggestion. Suggestion counts for something, but if that is what is doing the work, then what is doing the work isn’t Feng Shui.
What is Bazi
Year, month, day and hour of birth. Four points in time, each written as one heavenly stem over one earthly branch, eight characters altogether. That is where the name comes from: 八字, eight characters, also called the Four Pillars.
Those eight get read as a picture of temperament and timing. What someone is like, roughly what shape their working life takes, money, what to keep an eye on healthwise, which stretches of years run smooth and which grind. It sits alongside the house work in the tradition, since the same room suits one person and not the next.
People often ask about their Bazi and their star sign in the same breath. Different systems. Cast from different things. When the answers disagree that is normal, and it says nothing about either one.
“Enhancing the energy of the land”
This phrase has been turning up in my inbox more than it used to, mostly out of short video clips. Several quite different practices sit underneath it.
Adjusting how a block is laid out, or planting particular things in particular spots so that qi moves through it better: that is Feng Shui, and it is what I do. Performing the liturgy over the ground, petitioning on its behalf according to the rite: that is ritual, and as an ordained priest of the Zhengyi order it is also what I do.
Then there is a cleansing line: salt, water, herbs. Others bury stones or crystals or written talismans. Bells and chanting are their own thing again, and I know least about that one.
Those I don’t do and don’t sell. They exist in the tradition, and I’ll tell you so if you ask. If you came here for a crystal grid, I can’t help you.
A necessary word: this is traditional cultural and spiritual practice. Nothing here is medical, legal or financial advice, and I promise no supernatural outcome. For decisions involving illness, law or money, please consult the relevant professional.
Still have a question? Write to iching@dao.today.