Ham and Cheese on a Wry Bagua

Most Western ideas about feng shui are utterly wrong and generally based on a variety of weird concepts pulled from European folklore and New Age marketing — which are in turn marketed as “contemporary and practical” feng shui.

Despite all of the books rushing into print claiming “Feng Shui this” and “Feng Shui that,” the theoretical depth and full potential of the authentic material remain virtually unknown to the public.

Theory

For Black Sect Buddhists and other New Age types, their Bagua (or Ba Gua, Ba Qua, Pa Kua) is a so-called “mystical octagon of symbolic correlations,” This cafeteria-style approach to borrowed ideas was whipped into a lovely froth from Western cultural icons and concepts.

The new bagua supposedly represents “eight fundamental life conditions” that correlate to “a different aspect of ourselves.”

Yet it was created within the last thirty years and marketed entirely to New Agers ignorant of Asian culture.

According to Ho Lynn’s article in the execrable Feng Shui Anthology (published and edited by Jami Lin), this new Bagua was created by self-proclaimed “wandering impostor” Thomas Lin Yun, founder and spiritual leader of an American church called Black Sect Tibetan Buddhism. The new bagua is marketed as a “revolutionary” and “innovative” step in Chinese philosophy. In fact, it is so “revolutionary” that Asians laugh it off.

As one Korean-American practitioner of martial and healing arts said,

This is the sort of thing that Asians would use to make money off non-Asians.

The theories are labeled “Mutationist” for good reason.

According to the Feng Shui Anthology, Lin Yun took the Taiji (the Primordial, Great Unity or “Yin Yang symbol,” as everyone calls it) and set it spinning in its opposite direction. The Taiji and its corresponding systems move clockwise. A left-spinning Taiji — that is, one spinning counterclockwise — correlates with global culture’s views of aberrant behavior, misfortune, and necromancy.

All those occultists … who are brimming with claims about the strange and the marvelous … those occultists cheat people and delude the masses. They hold in their grasp the black arts and in their embrace all manner of false and faked means. … if one listens to what they say, it fills the ears to overflowing. But one should seek to take hold of what might actually be found, in the end one will have gained nothing, for it is an evasive thing, akin to binding the wind or clutching a shadow.

— Gao Yong, an esoteric master (Fang Shi) and advisor to Emperor Zheng (33 to 7 BCE)

Left (lyft: “weak,” “worthless” in Old English) still retains its primordial associations with antisocial behavior and disaster, the concept of sinister (“left hand,” “unlucky side”), in Sanskrit sauvastika (“all is evil,” movement which upsets the whole of nature). The Tibetan Bon religion uses symbols flowing counterclockwise to indicate black magic and opposition to Buddhism. A movement withershins (“against-direction”), nirrita, or cartua-sul traditionally begins and ends in irreverence, heterodoxy, perversity, death, infertility, and black arts.

Another bizarre theory promoted by the church is calling Kan, Gun, Qian, and Li yin guas because they don’t look any different when you flip them on their heads. Yang guas are those trigrams that do look different when they’re flipped. Flipping a trigram like a burger is a unique approach without any historical precedent — certainly one reason to call this stunt “innovative” in BTB marketing materials and articles.

When you compare the Luoshu of Daoism with the Luoshu developed by Lin Yun you see the rich diversity of material in the original. The New Age bagua stipulates that people enter their homes in the sectors for Skills/knowledge, Career, or Travel/Helpful people. Taoism assigns different interpretations to those sectors, and people enter their homes based on the actual location of the door as it relates to compass headings.

The Luoshu according to Daoism The Luoshu according to Lin Yun
Taoist Bagua McBagua

Because the Hetu is not used in the New Age versions of feng shui, it is largely ignored by the New Age crowd because they do not know what it is or does. They think it is not used in feng shui when in fact it is.

McFengshui

Knowing the telltale direction indicators makes it easy to spot BTB ideas even when they have been repurposed to suit the ideologies of each new book by yet another self-proclaimed “Feng Shui master” who attended a Lin Yun seminar and was exhorted by him to rush out and get a book deal. They share one another’s ideas and emphasize various New Age fads, folklore, mythologies, and psychobabble.These “experts” do not agree on a definition of feng shui because with McFengshui they don’t have to, and they are encouraged to invent their own. That is why they are so knowledgeable about marketing New Age ideas, western occult lore, and techniques of the con artist. That’s why this product is called McFengshui. Here are some typical examples.

Janice Ash

Ash says feng shui is

A technique that organizes and arranges furniture and decorative items making it easier to achieve goals, prosper, and feel more energetic.

Before the invention of McFengshui this was called good housekeeping.

Ellen Whitehurst

Ellen Whitehurst defines feng shui as some sort of object-relations psychology — ironic, considerng the pathological narcissism at the heart of McFengshui:

whatever you put all around your external environment, whether that means your home or office or even your car, has an impact, an influence, a profound psychological effect on everything that then goes on inside of you.

If you suffer from abulia, associative agnosia or Capgrass Syndrome how does her version of feng shui work?

Whitehurst has limited her vision of feng shui to her feeble range of science knowledge. This limitation affects most McFengshui enthusiasts — they have no effective responses to people with better information, or a science education.

Terah Kathryn Collins

Terah Kathryn Collins trademarked her version of feng shui, which she markets as honoring “the essence of its Eastern Form School Feng Shui heritage, while focusing on the practical applications it has in our Western culture.” Look up the word essence and you wonder: does she mean an immaterial spirit, a derived substance, or the invariable nature of the subject? It does not matter: this is marketing.

Collins seems unaware that what she calls “form school” (San He) uses a compass.

In denial

It is no coincidence that McFengshui does not acknowledge global warming or have a response beyond “buy more stuff” (green cleaning products and “chi enhancers”) while the practitioner learns how to fleece people using building biology (bau-biologie). McFengshui is stuck in the 19th century, talking about life force and auras and reeking of colonialism.

Real feng shui does not exist to arrange the environment for our personal gain — that is what got us into our environmental mess! Feng shui exists to fit us within the environment. By doing that feng shui keeps us safe and healthy. That is why feng shui can be used to combat global warming and environmental disaster.

What Authors & Consultants Promote BTB Church Ideas of Feng Shui?

—and a host of others. Check a book carefully for the “eight fundamental life stations” or whatever cute metaphor the author may use to disguise Lin Yun’s ideology.


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