Energy and Circulation

Translator's note. Two criteria, and nothing else. Almost every disagreement about feng shui in the English literature is about forms — this shape, that corner, this animal on the roof. This piece argues that forms are irrelevant unless they change the size of an energy and whether it reaches the person in question. The bomb analogy is the author's, and it does the whole job: a detonation can be enormous and still be none of your business.

Two things decide whether a site is auspicious, and only two. Everything else — the shape of the hill, the animal on the roof, the name of the star — matters only insofar as it changes one of them. A layout can be textbook-perfect and still deliver nothing.

One: the quantity of energy

Size decides. Even an inauspicious energy, if it is small, amounts to nothing inauspicious. An auspicious energy that is small amounts to nothing auspicious either. If you tell someone you have made money and they ask how much and the answer is one cent, the question of auspiciousness has already been settled — by the number.

This is why a practitioner has to keep watching that one quantity. What produces fortune and misfortune is energy, not configuration. A layout can be textbook-perfect and still deliver nothing, because nothing was delivered.

And there is a second half to this criterion, which is easy to forget: does the energy have anything to do with me? An atomic bomb detonating in Japan releases an enormous quantity. It also leaves a household in China untouched. The size was real. The relevance was zero.

Two: whether it circulates

The bomb in Japan did not reach China because its energy did not travel to China. This is the second criterion, and in practice it eliminates more claims than the first.

There is no shortage of poison in the world. If you did not swallow it, it has no bearing on your life. Put it in your mouth, inject it into your vein, and now that same poison is decisive. Nothing about the poison changed. The path changed.

Money is the same. Money exists everywhere and is of no use to you until it reaches your account — until it reaches the point you are standing on.

This is what the old books call the origin point (原点, yuandian) — the person, the bed, the coffin, the shop counter, the specific spot whose fate is being read. A malefic hill in the distance is not a malefic anything until its energy arrives at an origin point. A river that turns beautifully two valleys away is a landscape, not a benefit.

What this rules out

Once these two criteria are in place, most of the popular vocabulary loses its footing.

Balance. Practitioners say feng shui is about balance — light and dark, yin and yang, colour and material. Consider what balance would mean under the two criteria. If one atomic bomb goes off in Britain and one in Japan, the two are balanced. Has China thereby become fortunate? A knife in the chest is unbalanced. A second knife in the back restores the balance. Is the patient better off?

Balance is a property of a picture. It is not a property of what reaches a person.

Configuration alone. A house can satisfy every formal rule in every school and still be a poor site, because the rules describe shape and the outcome depends on quantity and arrival. Conversely, a site that looks wrong by the books can be excellent for one member of a family and ruinous for another, because the origin points differ.

The water mouth. The classical instruction is to look at the water mouth first — where the valley drains. It is not a bad thing to look at. But if the water mouth has no path to your origin point, the observation is scenery. Someone else's wife being beautiful is not a reason for you to be pleased.

Where this leaves the practice

When you read a site, or change one, the whole method reduces to two questions:

1. How much energy is arriving, and of what kind?
2. Does it reach the origin point, or does it stop somewhere else?

Everything else — the names of the stars, the shapes of the hills, the position of the furniture — is either a way of estimating those two answers or it is decoration. Decoration can be pleasant. It should not be billed as a cause.

An energy that does not exist is a fiction. An energy that exists but does not reach you is also a fiction, in the only sense that matters to the person who paid for the reading.