Can Ancestral Graves Affect the Fate of Descendants?

Translator's note. The question every client asks first, and the one the collection answers most carefully. The argument is not traditional — it does not appeal to the classics — but built on heredity and on the observed fact that close kin react at a distance. The mobile-phone mast is the metaphor that carries it: the bones transmit, the terrain around the grave determines whether the signal gets out, and the living are the handsets. The last paragraph is worth noting: an expensive tomb decides nothing, and a large construction can damage the very vein it was built to honour.

What is an ancestral grave?

An ancestral grave is the place where an ancestor's bones are buried or kept. That place may be open country, it may be a house, it may be a public columbarium — any place at all. The landscape and vegetation around the place where the bones are buried or kept make up the feng shui environment of the ancestral grave.

Several thousand years of practice have confirmed that the feng shui environment of an ancestral grave is closely related to the fate of every one of its descendants. Contemporary science cannot yet explain the mechanism at the root, and some people flatly deny that any such relation exists. But we may still hope to understand and explain the matter by rational argument.

That the residential environment can affect a person's fate is established by science. In a very noisy environment a person's physical capacity and thinking are both seriously impaired; live there long enough and hallucinations of hearing and sight appear, then dizziness, then mental disturbance. That is the most visible effect of environment on a person. As for the subtler and deeper influence of the earth qi — the information-energy field — formed by a residential environment, we need only recall the “haunted houses” and “inauspicious dwellings” reported from all over the world, and the harm they do to their occupants, to see that the residential environment does affect a person's fate.

But why should an ancestral grave also affect a person's fate?

A person is born of parents, and the parents of grandparents. Modern science has established that a person inherits information — genes — not only from the parents but indirectly, in part, from the grandparents as well. Because of this inheritance of information, there is between close kin a fairly strong bond of invisible, intangible information. In real life, when one member of a family meets with great calamity, relatives a thousand or ten thousand li away will at that very hour feel oppressed, agitated, visibly changed in body and mind. That is the typical expression of the information bond between kin. Even between people who are not kin such bonds sometimes appear: the everyday phenomenon of “speak of Cao Cao and Cao Cao arrives” is enough to show objectively that there exist between people channels of information we do not yet understand.

After death, so long as the bones or ashes have not been scattered and dispersed — or completely rotted into the soil and merged with it — this inherited information continues to communicate with the living relatives, all the time. If the geographical environment of the place where the bones are laid forms an auspicious configuration of earth qi — an auspicious environmental information-energy field — then the living relatives receive auspicious information and energy, and those who receive auspicious information and energy are themselves auspicious. Conversely, if the earth qi of the ancestral grave is a dangerous and unfavourable field, the relatives receive dangerous, unfavourable information, and they meet with calamity after calamity and difficulty in everything.

By way of analogy: the bones or ashes are a mobile-phone mast. The qi field of the burial place is the landscape in which the mast stands. The living relatives are the handsets. As long as the mast is not broken — that is, as long as the bones are not scattered — clear signal from the mast means the handsets receive clear audio and data. But build the mast at the bottom of a deep ravine, and even if the mast itself is in perfect order, the handsets cannot communicate. Which is to say that the terrain where the mast stands seriously affects how well the handsets work.

In the same way, only if the qi field of the ancestral grave is auspicious — only if the environmental feng shui configuration is favourable — can the ancestors' bones transmit auspicious information to their descendants, and only then are the descendants fortunate.

So: change the geographical configuration of the ancestral grave and you change its qi field. Change the qi field and the descendants' fate changes accordingly.

One qualification, though. For people already born before the grave was changed, the change can only raise them within the level of fate they were born with — unless the grave is very substantially remade, in which case their level can be raised by one grade. For those born after the change, they reach easily the level that the new qi field sets. It is like a television station that used to broadcast by microwave, so that your set received poorly, and now transmits by cable: the set is the same set, but reception is much better than before.

So changing the feng shui of an ancestral grave certainly can change a person's fate.

The quality of a site is decided by the auspicious or inauspicious energy of the vein. The energy of the sand and water around the point is only focal energy, and cannot produce great wealth or high office. As for the structures raised outside the tomb — however carefully designed, however lavish and imposing — they decide nothing about the feng shui. Their force is at most like the fine-tuning knob on a television. A magnificent, luxurious tomb may be nothing but a façade, a flower without fruit; and sometimes the very scale of the construction damages the vein's qi.