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New Age Feng Shui
March 2002 — Koln, Germany — Presented at the Traditional Feng Shui Conference
New Age Feng Shui
Feng Shui Revelations
17-18-19 August 2001 — São Paulo, Brasil — see images
Building the Chinese Universe
The discovery in the 1970s of manuscripts in the third tomb at Mawangdui testifies to the rich culture of China at the time of the Former Han dynasty (206 BCE–CE 8). The release of Mawangdui Hanmu wenwu, celebrated at the First International Conference on the Mawangdui Tombs (Changsha, Hunan, August 1992), has afforded China scholars a wealth of information about the Xing-De divinatory method (Punishment and Virtue), Yinyang wuxing (Yin-yang and the Five Agents), and the manuscripts’ place in the technical traditions of late antiquity.
However, what has not been clear until now is how these discoveries affect the current flood of fengshui books, Web sites, and marketing materials. Scholarly treatises show that the material provides unquestionable evidence of fengshui as part of long-standing technical traditions. Conspicuous in their absence are the “intuitive,” method, the “Three Mouths of Ch’i” method, and other fengshui fads.
This three-day course introduces the background of the Mawangdui texts from anthropological sources, including tantalyzing links with the BMAC (Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex) and Andronovo culture, along with the following information:
- the Xing-De method
- the nine palaces and sectors/agents
- the symbolism of cord-hook diagrams and their relation to divination boards, liuren astrolabes, liubo boards, TLV mirrors, and sundials
- the ya-shaped world of the Shang and its influence on cord-hook diagrams, astrolabes, and liubo boards
- astronomical and meteorological considerations
Along with the historical and theoretical information, the Mawangdui texts provide additional ways of looking at a fengshui audit that bridge cosmology and human actions, ancient techniques and modern conditions. The texts provide us with the following:
- ancient ways of interpreting the Luoshu and Hetu that explain later developments in fengshui application
- additional understanding of the rings of the Luopan and their use
- supplementary analysis techniques
- case studies that show how to incorporate these techniques into current practice
- other solutions that oppose fengshui fads and fakes with superior information
Time and Space: a Graphic Novel of Feng Shui
People often ask how the calendar and astronomy work with feng shui. I hope this small effort helps. Let me know if you’d like more information.
The basics
If you haven’t absorbed the basics of the history of feng shui, start there. This provides only a little of the introductory material.
Notice that the Heaven-Round, Earth Square (tianyuan difang) — what John Major calls the “cliche” of early China — shows you a central palace (inside the square, which is Earth) surrounded by four palaces (the circle, which is the heavens).
At 90 degrees north latitude, at the north geographic pole, the celestial and terrestrial Equators are equal. Here the North Star is directly above you, and the stars travel anticlockwise around the horizon. This is the situation idealized by the Central Pool of Heaven, where the needle is housed in a Luopan. The red cross lines on a luopan indicate the two principal meridians of the celestial sphere. One line passes through the poles and the two solstices. The other line passes through the celestial poles and the ecliptic at the two equinoxes. 
Anticlockwise is the direction of the stars, the Jupiter stations (ci), and the stems. The branches move clockwise.
Daoist tradition says the tianyuan difang is built from astronomy. The Heaven-Round, Earth-Square was used by Hongshan culture at Niuheliang (3770 to 2920 BCE), and it is found elsewhere in Neolithic China.1 There weren’t any Daoists in Neolithic China, however.
Nu Gua used the legs of the Celestial Turtle to reset the calendar of her time. The four points are the feet of one of the celestial turtles.
Tian Bie, another celestial turtle, was a marker for the coming of winter at the time of the Zhou. Earlier it had been a marker for the spring equinox. It is also associated with the discovery of the Hetu and Luoshu, about the time when Bie crawled out of the river (meaning that precession moved the Milky Way into the position of vernal equinox marker, sometime in the sixth millennium BCE).2
The north is our vantage point as we view these diagrams (the central palace is circumpolar). That is why Nu Gua used a turtle to fix the calendar. It also explains why old Chinese navigational compasses sometimes used turtle-shapes for the lodestone.
Here is an idealized view of how this occurred. First, we round off the orbit of Suixing (Jupiter) so it approximates Earth months.
Then we arrange the sky (and thus our directions) so that there’s a correlation: 12 directions.
Just so we don’t forget this is a stylized version of a heliocentric system and a viewpoint using the celestial circle, here is the three-legged crow of the sun (a sunspot personified).
Now we transfer the markings onto an Earth-shaped board (like a liuren). The crow is there just to remind you that this is heliocentric and circumpolar.
Next you can see how the system starts to take shape.
References
- Sarah M. Nelson, Rachel A. Matson, Rachel M. Roberts, Chris Rock, and Robert E. Stencel. Archaeoastronomical Evidence for Wuism at the Hongshan Site of Niuheliang. 10 June 2006.
- Deborah Lynn Porter. From Deluge to Discourse. SUNY Press 1996. Page 36.
