No mystification — only the parts that touch the ground. Classical meaning, technique, case notes, and modern life as one Daoist sees it.https://dao.today/en-AUSean Lau · 九宸道人https://dao.today/en/blog/southern-hemisphere-feng-shui/https://dao.today/en/blog/southern-hemisphere-feng-shui/Below the equator, one layer flips and the rest doesn't. Landform doesn't: the shape of hills and water reads the same in any hemisphere. The star cycle doesn't: the Three Cycles and Nine Periods run globally, and everyone is in Period Nine. The compass doesn't: the twenty-four mountains are read off magnetic north as usual. What flips is the Later Heaven placement of the trigrams, because that placement was fitted to conditions on the ground. Central China is hot in the south and cold in the north, so Li sits south and Kan sits north. Australia is hot in the north and cold in the south, so those two swap, the four corners swap with them, and east and west stay put. The solar terms follow: December is read as midsummer. The stars stay; the earthly trigrams move.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTFeng ShuiAustraliaiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/what-a-feng-shui-audit-checks/https://dao.today/en/blog/what-a-feng-shui-audit-checks/A pre-purchase audit has three parts. Outside: the slope of the block, roads pointed at the house, where stormwater goes, and what the neighbouring buildings do to the site. Orientation: a compass reading taken on site to fix the sitting and facing, read for the southern hemisphere where north is the sunny aspect. Inside: the entrance, the paths the household actually walks, the stove, the beds, where the bathrooms sit, and the light in each room. One to two hours on site, then a written report sorting everything into problems, things you can change and how, and things you can't change and have to work around. It doesn't replace a building inspection or legal advice, and it promises no outcome.Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTFeng ShuiAustraliaiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/what-bazi-can-and-cannot-tell/https://dao.today/en/blog/what-bazi-can-and-cannot-tell/A Bazi chart is the year, month, day and hour of your birth, each written as one heavenly stem and one earthly branch, eight characters in total. What it reads well is tendency and timing: how a person is built, which of the five phases the chart runs heavy or thin in and what can be done about that, and which stretches of life open up and which close down. It does not read events: no accident dates, no stock picks, no lottery numbers, and nothing about how long anyone lives. Accuracy also rests heavily on the hour of birth, and when the hour can't be verified, an honest practitioner tells you which parts of the reading are off the table.Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTChinese MetaphysicsBasicsiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/the-front-door/https://dao.today/en/blog/the-front-door/In yang-dwelling practice the front door is the qi kou, the mouth of qi: everything moving between a house and the world outside passes through that one point. Three things decide whether a door works. First, whether there is a square metre of transition inside it where you can put keys down and get your shoes off, or whether opening the door drops you straight into a traffic route. Second, which way it faces and what your eye hits when it opens: a hallway running dead straight to the back door, a staircase, a toilet. Third, whether it is the door the household actually uses, which in Sydney it frequently isn't, because people come up the driveway and in through the laundry. Most of the visible half comes right with a cabinet, a rug and a light, no renovation involved.Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTFeng Shuiiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/fengshui-is-not-superstition/https://dao.today/en/blog/fengshui-is-not-superstition/Feng Shui is neither superstition nor science. It is a craft built from accumulated experience: an old, concrete body of rules about how people and the places they live get along, encoded in the best vocabulary a Song or Ming scholar had available (yin and yang, the five phases, dragon and vein and water). It cannot be falsified in a laboratory, and it shouldn't be dismissed as fraud. Whether it works is judged by whether the people who live there do well, not by whether it survives a double-blind trial.Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTFeng ShuiBasicsiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/bedroom-and-bed-position/https://dao.today/en/blog/bedroom-and-bed-position/Bed position is the first thing I check in a bedroom: a third of your life happens there with your guard down. The old rules translate into physical causes. A solid wall behind the headboard closes off a direction the body would otherwise be monitoring all night. A window above your head means unstable temperature and early light, and an exposed beam is mostly visual pressure, the least physical item on the list. Line the bed up with a door and you spend the night facing the one opening anything comes through. Sleep beside a bathroom, or under one, and the problem is plumbing: in a two-storey Australian house the upstairs waste pipe usually runs through the ceiling cavity of the room below. In Sydney two cases come up constantly: seventies and eighties brick houses with low, wide, single-glazed bedroom windows, and new houses where the ensuite gives the bedroom a second door nobody accounts for. Most rooms have one or two of these, and every item on the list is something you can check for yourself.Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTFeng Shuiiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/kitchen-and-stove/https://dao.today/en/blog/kitchen-and-stove/Put the stove against a solid wall, not under a window and not with a walkway behind it. Keep it off the line that runs from one door through to another, don't set it directly opposite or hard alongside the sink, and leave bench space between it and the fridge. The old formula, that the stove seat presses on the inauspicious direction while the stove mouth faces the auspicious one, was written for a masonry wood-fired stove with a real back and a real feeding mouth. An induction hob has neither, so I don't force that part of the reading. What still holds after the fuel changed is simple: the fire needs a stable position, something behind it, and nobody walking through it.Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTFeng Shuiiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/apartment-feng-shui-australia/https://dao.today/en/blog/apartment-feng-shui-australia/In an apartment the facing comes off the unit, not off the building. I use whichever wall carries the unit's main glass, because the corridor your front door opens onto is interior space and nothing arrives through it. After that the questions are how many sides the unit has glass on, which way the balcony points (north is the sunny side in Australia), and what the front door opens onto. The thing that shapes the whole report is strata: the door and the façade are not yours to alter, so every remedy has to work inside your own walls.Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTFeng ShuiAustraliaiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/wuwei-is-not-doing-nothing/https://dao.today/en/blog/wuwei-is-not-doing-nothing/Wu wei does not mean doing nothing, and it is not a licence to give up. In pre-Qin Chinese, wei leans toward contriving and imposing, forcing a thing into a shape you decided on before looking at it, and that is what wu wei refuses. Chapter 3 of the Dao De Jing writes it as 為無為, do non-doing, so it is plainly something a person carries out; Chapter 64 says the forcer wrecks what he handles. Cook Ding in the Zhuangzi keeps one blade for nineteen years by sending a thin edge into the gaps the joints already leave, and in ordinary work that means spending the effort on reading a thing rather than forcing it.Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDaoist Studiesiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/date-selection/https://dao.today/en/blog/date-selection/Date selection starts from the birth chart of whoever the event is for: the couple for a wedding, the owner for an opening, the landholder for ground-breaking, the household for moving in. Each candidate day's stem-and-branch pair is read against that chart, along with what the event itself requires and which direction is being disturbed. The suitable and avoid lines printed in a Chinese almanac are properties of the day alone, identical for everyone on the planet, and know nothing about you beyond your zodiac year, so they serve as a filter rather than an answer. None of it improves the underlying conditions of a marriage or a business. The claim is narrower than that: good timing keeps the event from adding to the trouble.Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTChinese Metaphysicsiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/daodejing-chapter-one/https://dao.today/en/blog/daodejing-chapter-one/Chapter One of the Dao De Jing is about the reach of language, not about the Dao being too mystical to discuss. Anything you can state, or fix a name to, is already the particular one, not the lasting one. Laozi knows this about his own book: in Chapter 25 he says the name is one he was forced to give. Two things are worth knowing while you read. The received text has 常, but the Mawangdui silk manuscripts have 恒, unchanging; the character was substituted because 恒 was the personal name of Emperor Wen of Han and had to be avoided. And the next line can be punctuated two ways, as nameless and named, or as non-being and being, which sends the chapter somewhere different each time.Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDaoist Studiesiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/zhengyi-and-quanzhen/https://dao.today/en/blog/zhengyi-and-quanzhen/It depends which school he belongs to. Chinese Daoism has two main ones. Zhengyi descends from the Celestial Master Zhang Daoling at the end of the Han, with its ancestral seat at Longhu Mountain in Jiangxi; its priests have always been mainly householders, ordained by receiving registers passed master to disciple with a generation character, working in talismans and liturgy, free to marry, eat meat and hold another job. Quanzhen was founded by Wang Chongyang in the Jin–Yuan period, seated at the White Cloud Temple in Beijing and Chongyang Palace in Shaanxi, and is monastic: temple life, precept ordination, vegetarian, celibate, centred on inner alchemy. Marriage and meat tell you a priest's school, not how seriously he practises. I am Zhengyi, register-ordained, of the Shan generation.Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDaoismBasicsiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/highest-good-is-like-water/https://dao.today/en/blog/highest-good-is-like-water/Shang shan ruo shui, 上善若水, opens chapter 8 of the Dao De Jing: the highest good is like water, water is good at benefiting the ten thousand things and does not contend, it dwells in the places people find repellent, and so it is close to the Dao. Three separate claims are being made and they only work together. Water is permanently at work, doing good to everything it touches. The low ground everybody else steps around is where it ends up. Only standing on those two does it decline to contend, and the thing it declines is rank and credit, never the job. Drop the first two, keep the third, and what you have left is idleness with a scroll behind it, which reverses the chapter.Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMTDaoist Studiesiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/what-is-the-yijing/https://dao.today/en/blog/what-is-the-yijing/The book sold in English as the I Ching or Yi Jing is two texts bound together. The older half, the Zhou Yi proper, is a divination manual: sixty-four hexagrams, each with a short judgment and six line statements, written in a clipped formulaic vocabulary of auspicious, inauspicious, regret, no blame. The second half, the Ten Wings, is commentary composed centuries later by several hands, and it is the source of nearly every philosophical line people quote. Chinese editions have interleaved the two since around the third century and most translations follow suit, which is why a first-time reader cannot tell that one sentence is many hundreds of years older than the sentence beneath it.Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTYi JingBasicsiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/why-a-daoist-writes-code/https://dao.today/en/blog/why-a-daoist-writes-code/Writing software and reading houses demand the same discipline: work out the structure you cannot see before you touch anything. I am an ordained Zhengyi priest of the Longhu Shan lineage, Shan generation, and I hold a computing degree from the University of Technology Sydney and a master's in accounting from UNSW. I started practising in Sydney in 2016. Casting a bazi chart is a deterministic algorithm: given a birth moment and place, every step follows fixed rules, and two trained people must arrive at an identical chart. In 2021 I founded Dao Metaverse and built its 3D temple, AI scripture teaching and Daoist academy on the same working habits I use in software. Cite the source, flag what is uncertain, invent nothing.Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTPersonaliching@dao.today (Sean Lau)https://dao.today/en/blog/feng-shui-faq/https://dao.today/en/blog/feng-shui-faq/Feng Shui is the craft of reading a place: how the ground sits, where water runs, which way a building faces, how the rooms are arranged, and whether people will do well living there. Work for the living is Yang Zhai: houses, shops, offices. Choosing a burial site is Yin Zhai, a branch still taught mouth to ear rather than out of books. It does not meet the test of falsifiability and I do not claim it as a science; it runs on inherited experience plus a framework of reasoning borrowed from the Yi Jing. An audit means about two hours on site with a compass and a written report afterwards, and most of what I recommend costs nothing to carry out. Bazi is a separate method reading the eight characters of a birth time, often used alongside.Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTFeng ShuiBasicsiching@dao.today (Sean Lau)