First meeting, small talk over, and eight times in ten this is the question.
Sometimes it’s asked honestly. More often the person has already decided the answer and is waiting to see how I handle it. Some are preparing to be politely sceptical. Others rush to defend me before I’ve said anything: “No, no, I know Feng Shui is actually very scientific.”
I don’t take either hat.
“Actually very scientific” does me no favours
Science has its own rules. Falsifiable, repeatable, control groups. Feng Shui did not grow up under those rules. Push it into a laboratory and there is only one possible outcome, which is embarrassing.
What the person saying it usually hasn’t noticed is that they’re applying for a permit on my behalf. As though the craft has no right to exist unless it can produce scientific credentials. Cooking has no such credentials. Neither does carpentry, or an old farmer reading tomorrow’s weather off the clouds. They work anyway.
I know several colleagues who love to talk about quantum fields and energy frequencies. I can’t be bothered to argue with them, but I know that’s marketing, not explanation.
“Superstition” doesn’t get us anywhere either
In Chinese, 迷信 isn’t a description, it’s a verdict. Accept the word and the conversation is over; what’s left is a fight about positions.
So I usually don’t accept it. I ask instead: what exactly do you mean by Feng Shui?
Seven out of ten can’t say, or what they say is “putting a pixiu statue on the shelf, hanging a gourd, buying a lucky cat.” Then I agree with them. That part is superstition, and the people selling it earn considerably more than I do.
What is actually in the craft
Almost every house I have read as having a problem comes down to something you could explain to a builder.
A front door opening onto a long straight corridor. The old formula calls this qi failing to gather. In practice: the transitional space at the entrance has been deleted. You push the door open and you’re standing in a traffic route, with nowhere to put your keys down, change your shoes, take a breath. Live there three or five years and you won’t blame the corridor. You’ll just find the house tiring.
A bed with its head against the window. You sleep with the back of your skull facing an unstable temperature and unstable sound. Sydney has a lot of seventies and eighties brick housing where the master bedroom window is low and wide, and in winter that wall is as cold as the outside. This needs no metaphysics. Put your hand on it.
Stove directly facing sink. Fire clashing with water. Translated: you cross back and forth between two high-frequency tasks, the paths intersect, it’s inefficient and it’s how people get burned.
There was going to be a fourth about sharp corners aimed at the front door, but I can’t explain that one well. It is visually unpleasant, certainly. I have not found a firm pattern for it in my own cases. Some schools are absolutely categorical about it; I read it as the formula says and I’m not confident. When it comes up, I tell the client that this is what the school holds, and they can decide how much weight to give it.
In the southern hemisphere, half of it has to be relearned
This is the most practical thing I’ve learned in Australia.
The Chinese rule about sitting north and facing south is a rule about daylight. At thirty-something degrees north, the sun is in the south, so a south-facing house gets winter sun. Sydney is at thirty-four degrees south. The sun is in the north. That’s why “north-facing” is a selling point in every property listing here.
So the form school, meaning landform and facing and the gathering of wind and qi, has to be read in reverse below the equator. North is the sunny aspect; south is the shaded one. Sydney’s cold winds come from the south and southwest, off Antarctica. The northwesterlies are the hot ones. All of this is upside down relative to the experience the classics were built on.
The compass school I don’t flip. The twenty-four mountains follow magnetic direction, not the sun, and I lay out the flying stars as I was taught. There is disagreement about this. I know senior practitioners who reverse the whole system. I don’t, because the compass method is built on direction rather than sunlight. But I won’t claim certainty.
Practising here for ten years, I’ve seen too many cases of the mainland formula applied without adjustment. A house with beautiful northern light judged as “facing away from the sun,” and the client paying to move the master bedroom to the dark side. That one is hard to watch.
What I don’t do
Feng Shui does not rewrite your fate, and it does not replace a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant. I promise no supernatural outcome, and I don’t trade in pronouncements about life and death from a distance. For anything involving illness, law or money, go to the relevant professional.
That line sits in the footer of every page on this site. It isn’t there for compliance. It’s what I actually think.
Then why keep the old words
People ask: if it all translates into plain speech, why not drop qi, luantou, wuxing altogether.
Because translation loses things. The single character 氣 holds airflow, daylight, sound, sightline, a sense of psychological pressure, and a little of how people get along, all at once. There is no modern word that carries that much in one hand. The old vocabulary is coarse, but it is coarse in a complete way.
There’s also the practical matter that these terms are the interface to a whole system. Change the interface and every method hanging off it comes apart.
As for the Way follows what is so of itself, which everybody likes to quote at the end of these things. What it actually means is that nature doesn’t wait for your understanding before taking effect. Houses are the same. Not knowing which way yours faces won’t keep it warm.