Precautions When Setting the Focal Point

Translator's note. A short, sharp essay on remediation, and the best demolition of the trade's two favourite explanations that I have seen in this collection. “Four ounces deflect a thousand catties” and “you strike the mountain's death point the way a needle stops the heart” are both, Lü points out, true statements attached to objects nobody has ever located — the mountain's heart, the building's death point. What follows is the positive doctrine: do not block bad energy, deflect it, or move the origin. The Yu the Great passage makes the argument better than any feng shui text could. As usual, a paragraph of curses against plagiarists has been reduced to a note.

With a focal point, if more energy arrives from inauspicious directions and less from auspicious ones, the point is mostly inauspicious. If more arrives from auspicious directions and less from inauspicious ones, it is mostly auspicious. Remember: no feng shui can be a hundred per cent auspicious. There is always some inauspicious energy in it, because among the twenty-four directions of the full circle, with all their sand and water, it is impossible that every grain of sand and every stream is auspicious. That is precisely why we need to choose a site, and why we need to adjust one.

And what is the purpose of choosing and adjusting?

The purpose is to let the bad energy pass us by, and to make the good energy flow onto us — into our ancestral grave, into our house.

When choosing a site you must avoid the effect of inauspicious energy. How? We have discussed the question of “flow.” How does flow work? In fact, once you have learned to find a focal point you should already understand it. Suppose all the energy coming from the northeast is inauspicious. Then when you set the point you must arrange matters so that the northeast energy passes you by. However inauspicious the northeast energy may be, it will then have no inauspicious effect on the point, or very little.

When adjusting a site, the methods — shifting the origin, planting a row of trees around it, building a wall, building a house — serve the same end: move toward the auspicious and away from the inauspicious, let the bad energy pass us by, and let the good energy meet us unplanned.

How, then, do we achieve this in choosing and adjusting sites? First we must understand what feng shui actually is, what we are looking for when we look for it, and what causes auspicious and inauspicious feng shui. If we follow the traditional routine — move the door, change the facing, hang a qilin, hang a bagua mirror — it does have an effect, but the effect is produced by psychology. That is psychological feng shui, and it does not belong to natural-science feng shui. In other words: psychological feng shui alone cannot solve the fundamental problem. It can only make a very small adjustment.

In practice the simplest and most effective method is to shift the origin, or to let the inauspicious energy pass us by — not to block the bad energy and turn it back. Understand: no human-made object can turn bad energy back. However advanced a bulletproof vest is, it stops only ordinary rifle and pistol rounds. If a missile is coming at you, you can wear the vest and hide in a tank and it will do you no good. Understand that this world is a material world, and energy is its master. Can you hang a bagua mirror and reflect the energy of the building opposite back at it? Every traditional master says yes — and has a theory to support the absurdity.

The first theory: four ounces deflect a thousand catties.

On the surface it sounds entirely reasonable. But it does not survive logical analysis. You say a bagua mirror can deflect a thousand catties with four ounces, and can turn aside the energy of the inauspicious sand charging at you. I too believe in four ounces deflecting a thousand catties; I grant it is true. But how many thousand catties does the mountain opposite have? How many four-ounce portions does your mirror need? The mountain opposite does not have ten thousand catties — suppose it has ten thousand times a thousand catties. To deflect that, do you not need ten thousand times four ounces? Without them, how will you deflect it? Every martial artist knows that four ounces can deflect a thousand catties. The question is whether a three-year-old who knows the technique and can perform it can deflect a grown man standing in front of him. The “greatness” of traditional feng shui lies in its skill at deception: it plays logic games with you. The theory is correct; the mountain opposite cannot be deflected with four ounces. You would need an uncountable number of them. So the doctrine collapses under its own reasoning. Which is to say that any master who tells you he will neutralise inauspicious sand and water by the four-ounces method is a fool — or, to put it precisely, a master who understands nothing.

The second theory: the principle of the acupuncture point.

The argument is that sticking a needle into a man's heart will kill him. I believe that too. Not only a man: stick a needle into an elephant's heart and it will go down and lie still, and may die. The question is: where is the heart of the mountain opposite? Where is its death point? How many points does a mountain have? Which of them would stop that mountain's energy from acting in our direction? Do you know? Does any master know where the points of the mountain opposite are? When the sharp corner of a building opposite is aimed at you, where is that building's death point? I believe that if the death point of a building were found, a very light force might neutralise its adverse effect on you. Natural scientists have said that the earth too has a death point, and that if it could be found, a single grenade might detonate the planet and reduce it to dust. That is a scientist speaking, not a fable. It can be calculated physically. Find the earth's death point and a grenade would indeed do it. But where is it? The same scientists say the universe contains wormholes, and that if we could find one we could travel between the stars and make the old young again. But where is a wormhole? Nobody has found one.

So every theory in traditional feng shui looks correct on the surface, and every one of them plays cat and mouse with our descendants and our clients. For profit it commits one recurring logical error: it swaps one term for another in order to deceive us. “Four ounces deflect a thousand catties” and “striking the death point” as methods of averting harm do not survive logic, nor analysis of the objective facts, nor the test of practice.

Vein-qi points and focal points alike have their auspicious and inauspicious aspects. The best method of choosing a point and adjusting a site is not to block the inauspicious energy but to lead it away.

Why not block it? Because the inauspicious energy is not a small quantity. If it were tiny — a leaf falling on your head — you would not need to neutralise it at all. If it is great, like a mountain falling, the best response is not to catch it but to let it pass you by, to step aside, or to guide it off at an angle in another direction. That is the root of choosing and adjusting feng shui.

Go south and you will see bagua mirrors hanging on houses along both sides of the street: large and small, round and square, convex and concave, every variety, each reflecting the others. These are the masterpieces of feng shui practitioners. The Taiwanese master Yang Dengke recommends hanging a gold compass as his method for averting harm in every case. I ask: can a mirror, can a compass, return energy? How much energy does your mirror or your compass have, that it can return the energy of nature? These are tricks, or at best they work by psychological adjustment — and most ordinary people believe in them completely. We must be clear: this method of averting harm is surface work. Its function is psychological. It makes the client feel secure.

The principles that should govern genuinely choosing and adjusting a site for someone are these:

First, lead the inauspicious energy past the site.

Second, avoid the inauspicious energy — that is, shift the origin.

Without these two methods, every technique of adjusting feng shui and averting harm is either ineffective or barely effective. The only effect is psychological.

(At this point the original repeats its warning about plagiarism and appends a curse on plagiarists. The curse has been omitted.)

Our ancestors already told us the method for leading inauspicious energy past us. Everyone has heard the story of Yu the Great taming the waters. In the time of Emperor Yao, the Yellow River flooded constantly. To stop the flooding and protect the fields, Yao called the tribal chiefs together and asked for someone skilled at water management. Gun was recommended. Gun took the task and built dykes to hold the water back — a wall of triple height, a simple earth rampart thrown around the settlements to keep the flood out. After nine years he had not succeeded, and he was exiled to Mount Yu, where he died. Emperor Shun then appointed Gun's son, Yu. Yu reviewed his father's experience and replaced “enclosing and blocking” with “dredging, guiding and clearing the obstructions” — following water's natural tendency to run from high to low, and opening the choked channels along the lie of the land. He led the flood into cleared riverbeds, into hollows and lakes, and from there to the four seas. The waters were subdued, and the people came down from the high ground to live on the plains and farm again. Yu became the first king of the Xia dynasty, and was remembered as “Divine Yu.”

Our ancestors understood that water must be guided, that it cannot be stopped or turned back — so how could the energy of feng shui, energy falling from the sky, possibly be blocked?

Besides: to us on earth, vein energy is zero-state energy. It passes through any object. Can a bagua mirror stop it? This zero-state energy gathers somewhere because of gravity. It is not an energy our eyes can see — just as we cannot see air, though air objectively exists, and the reason an aircraft can fly is that air exists. This energy, which fills the universe and fills the dragon veins, is invisible, but it is objectively there. And just as air lifts an aircraft, this energy can change our fate.