Wind, water and direction
Feng Shui and the Chinese zodiac
Feng Shui — literally “wind and water” — and Chinese astrology can share vocabulary such as yin, yang and the five phases. Astrology applies those relationships to time and birth charts; Feng Shui applies them to places, directions and arrangements.
- Chart subject
- Time and birth
- Feng Shui subject
- Place and direction
- Shared language
- Yin–yang · five phases
One vocabulary · two crafts
Shared five-phase relationships
The same generating and controlling relationships that order the 60-year cycle appear in Feng Shui's treatment of spaces, materials and directions. Yin–yang polarity likewise qualifies every phase, direction and placement.
Later Heaven arrangement
Eight directions around one compass
A feng shui compass arranges trigrams, branches and phases around the horizon in concentric rings. These eight records show the Later Heaven positions.
- 01
East
震 Zhèn
Thunder
Wood phase → - 02
North
坎 Kǎn
Water
Water phase → - 03
North-east
艮 Gèn
Mountain
Earth phase → - 04
North-west
乾 Qián
Heaven
Metal phase → - 05
South
離 Lí
Fire
Fire phase → - 06
South-east
巽 Xùn
Wind
Wood phase → - 07
South-west
坤 Kūn
Earth
Earth phase → - 08
West
兌 Duì
Lake
Metal phase →
Fire sits south at the height of summer and Water north at its depth; Thunder is east where spring begins. Two trigrams share Wood, two share Metal, two share Earth, and Fire and Water take one each — which is why Earth is described as sitting at the corners rather than in a season.
Same coordinates · different object
What Feng Shui reads from the shared system
Almost every coordinate below is something a chart uses too, applied to a place instead of a birth.
- 01
The five phases and their two cycles
A direction carrying Wood is generated by the Water direction and controlled by the Metal one, using exactly the generating and controlling relations a chart applies to a Day Master. The arithmetic is identical; only what it is applied to changes.
- 02
The twelve branches as a compass
The same twelve that name the hours divide the horizon into twelve — 子 at north, 卯 at east, 午 at south, 酉 at west. A luopan ring of twelve branches and the two-hour periods of a birth time are the same cycle counted in different units.
- 03
The sixty-year cycle
Compass schools that time work by the year use the stem-branch year, with the same 立春 boundary a Four Pillars chart uses — which is why a date near early February can be read two ways in feng shui for precisely the reason it can in a chart.