What Are the Movement Laws of the Harmonized Yin–Yang Qi in Feng Shui?

Translator's note. This is the theoretical floor of the author's feng shui system. Everything he says elsewhere about siting, dragon veins and “true dragon points” rests on the two movement laws stated here: energy arrives from above and settles, and it is pressed down by mountains and drawn upward by water. The middle section is a polemic — he argues from the descendants of history's most celebrated feng shui masters rather than from texts. We have kept the argument and trimmed the repetition.

If you study feng shui, you cannot find the yin-yang chonghe zhi qi — the harmonized yin–yang energy — until you know how it moves. And to use it, you must know where it comes from and which way it travels.

1. It comes from the cosmos — from the air above

Relative to the ground, this energy moves from above downward. You may object that the Earth is round. To the Earth as a whole, yes; but to a local point of origin, the ground is a plane.

If the Earth neither revolved nor rotated, it would capture far less of this energy. The entire solar system is in motion; the entire galaxy is in motion; the Earth is in motion — revolving and rotating at once — while the solar system itself both orbits the galaxy and spins. So the harmonized yin–yang qi on Earth is captured in the course of that rotation and revolution.

For a person standing on the ground, energy also arrives at the top of the head. Once this energy contacts objects on the ground and lands, it takes one of two states:

(a) It gathers along the surface, from higher to lower. (b) It seeps into the soil and accumulates along the strata, running from high ground toward low.

Those are the movement laws of feng shui's “harmonized yin–yang qi.” A person moving about on the surface draws this energy from two channels: what falls directly from above, and what moves across the surface.

Now consider the Ming Tombs and the Eastern Qing Tombs. They were sited by the finest feng shui masters of their day — not one man but teams working together — and the result was the destruction of the imperial house. Those same masters did not produce a single official of prefectural rank among their own descendants. What does that tell you? That they did not know the movement laws of the qi in a dragon vein.

If you understood what vein qi actually is, then even failing to find a site that yields high office, you should at minimum manage a civil-service post for your family. If you have studied feng shui your whole life and cannot produce one civil servant in your own house — cannot even manage to father a son or a daughter — then your theory is wrong, and wrong in a way that was built in from the start. Surely you would not let your descendants end up as addicts or gamblers. Surely not in prison. Surely not losing an arm or a leg.

If you cannot deliver even these plain, ordinary things, then ask yourself whether your feng shui theory has a fatal flaw. We are not asking for great wealth. We are already born; if we came off the line as a tractor, there is nothing to be done about that. But we can change the engine and change the tyres. At minimum, we should be able to guarantee that children born after we understood feng shui will live to seventy, stay out of prison, keep their limbs, have a happy marriage, and get the son or daughter they wanted. At minimum, food on the table if not comfort. If you fail on any one of those, your feng shui theory is incomplete.

We do not demand greatness. But look across three thousand years: which feng shui master ever delivered that for his own descendants? Not one. Which means every feng shui theory on record has a fatal defect. Men who practised feng shui buried their own sons. Men who practised feng shui died young themselves. It is a miserable record.

So you must understand the movement laws of this energy. Understand that, and even if you go looking for sites using traditional theory, your hit rate will rise sharply.

2. Mountains press it down; water draws it up

The energy of a dragon vein and the energy of the harmonized yin–yang qi share the same basic law of motion: when it meets a mountain, it is pressed downward; when it meets water, it is drawn upward. That is the fundamental pattern.

Once you see this, you can begin to see which directions deliver auspicious energy and which deliver the harmful kind. These are only the basic laws, of course. The Earth is also rotating; what we have described holds without factoring in rotation, gravity or weight.

With that in hand, we can say that the traditional rule “there must be a mingtang — a bright hall — in front of the point” is not entirely wrong. A bright hall does collect energy. Traditional feng shui got that much right.

But that is surface energy. Energy inside the strata has nothing to do with it. Which means: a true dragon point is not equivalent to “having a bright hall.”

There are two kinds of true dragon point:

1. The focal point — where energy gathers in the bright hall.
2. The vein-qi point — where energy flows within the strata.

That is the movement law of the harmonized yin–yang qi. To talk about feng shui without understanding it is to talk nonsense.