Reading the Feng Shui of a Temple

Translator's note. The saying that opens this piece — the best feng shui sites in the world are all occupied by temples — is common in Chinese, and so is the conclusion drawn from it: that a temple's feng shui must be read backwards. The essay rejects both. It also takes up a question Western readers rarely meet: whether the fate of a monk or a priest can be read at all. The original names a specific abbot in a legal dispute; that example has been generalised.

Temples stand on famous mountains and beside great rivers, their incense halls are never empty, and their collecting boxes are never light. From this people conclude that the finest sites in the world have all been taken by religion, and that a temple must therefore be read by inverted rules — auspicious where a house would be inauspicious, inauspicious where a house would be auspicious.

Both conclusions are wrong, and they are wrong for the same reason: they read a building's success off one variable when at least five are in play.

The claim, and why it is wrong

A temple is a building. People live in it. Its incense burns brightly or dimly for reasons that can be listed and checked, and geography is only the first of them.

The claim that the mountains and rivers are reserved for temples confuses cause with selection. Temples are on famous mountains because that is where people were willing to build them, and because a mountain site draws visitors for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of its sand and water. The site was chosen for scenery, prestige and accessibility. Those are real advantages. They are not feng shui advantages, and they do not prove that the site is auspicious in the technical sense.

What actually decides whether a temple thrives

Take the factors in order of strength.

First: location, meaning transport and population. A temple thrives where people can reach it and where there are people to reach it. The Potala Palace in Lhasa draws constantly, and it would draw nothing if it stood on the summit of Everest. Nothing about its sand and water would change; everything about its footfall would. Within a single region of equal prosperity, a temple on a road with a dense population around it will, other things being equal, always outdraw one on a back road with few neighbours.

Second: what is enshrined, and who is doing the practice. Given equal location, the draw depends on which deity is honoured and on the cultivation of the monks or priests who serve there. Better practice draws more people. A larger and older institution draws more people. And a deity whose function matches what the surrounding population actually wants draws more people than one whose function does not.

Third: feng shui. With location and institution held equal, the better the site, the stronger the draw.

Note what the ordering does. Feng shui is a real factor, and it is the third factor, not the first. A practitioner who reads a temple's prospects from sand and water alone is doing what a shopfront reader does when he ignores the street.

Fourth, and this is why the third factor is hard to isolate: a temple that has stood for centuries has probably earned its site. Long survival is evidence that the site works, because institutions that sit on bad sites do not survive wars, fires and dynastic changes for a thousand years. So the causal arrow runs both ways, and a reading that treats the site as the sole cause will overstate it every time.

The practical consequence is a checklist rather than a verdict. To judge a temple, assess five things: the sand-water configuration, the transport, the population density, the institution's history, and the cultivation of its clergy. Only the first of the five is feng shui. A reading that stops at the first is not a stricter reading, it is a narrower one.

The same applies in reverse when a site is being chosen. A temple sited on excellent sand and water with no road and no neighbours will not thrive. Site selection has to weigh transport, population and the clergy who will serve there, alongside the terrain.

Why temple feng shui is not read backwards

This is where the tradition goes badly wrong, and it goes wrong in a way that is easy to expose.

The argument for inversion runs like this. Monks and priests are practitioners, not householders, so ordinary rules do not apply. If a temple's feng shui were excellent, the place would be crowded from morning to night, and the clergy would have no quiet for practice. Therefore a good temple site must be a bad site by household standards.

The argument sounds coherent until you ask what a building without energy actually does to the people inside it. Invert the rules completely and you have asserted that a temple has no energy. Three consequences follow, and none of them is compatible with a functioning monastery.

Poverty. If the site carries nothing, the temple has nothing. The clergy go hungry and leave. A community that cannot feed itself cannot sustain a practice, let alone a tradition of a thousand years.

No visitors. If the site draws nothing, nobody comes. A temple with no one in it cannot teach, cannot serve, and cannot transmit anything to anyone.

Short and damaged lives. People who live on a site without energy are subject to the same consequences as anyone else — illness, accident, early death. A monastery whose residents are sick and dying young is not a place of cultivation. It is a place of attrition.

The inversion theory is a rationalisation of the fact that temples sit on sites that look unusual by household standards. Mountains, cliffs, springs, isolations — these are chosen for scenery and for the kind of retreat that religious institutions want. They are not evidence that the rules reverse. A temple's sand and water are read exactly as a house's are read, because the energy does not know what kind of building is standing in it.

Can a monk's fate be read?

Traditional prediction, and a number of well-known practitioners, hold that the fate of monks and priests cannot be calculated. They are said to have left the world — fangwai zhi ren, people outside the boundaries — and to be beyond the reach of the systems that read ordinary lives.

This is not a limit of the subject. It is a limit of the method being used.

Whatever the ordination, the person still eats, drinks and breathes. The classical formula is that anyone still within the three realms and not yet beyond the five elements remains governed by the five elements. A body that takes in food, water and air is a body in the same field as every other body. What changes with ordination is the content of a life, not its mechanics.

What actually happens is narrower and more interesting: certain domains go blank because the ordinary markers are absent. A monk who does not marry has no marriage state to predict. A monk with no children has no children to predict. Those questions are not unanswerable, they are inapplicable.

The remaining domains are entirely readable. A temple has money or it does not, and its abbot handles funds or does not. There is status and the lack of it, health and the lack of it, safety and danger, disputes and litigation and the absence of both. Anyone who has watched a major temple through a public controversy knows how visible those domains are, and how sharply they can turn.

So the correct statement is not that the clergy are beyond prediction. It is that the reading has to be aimed at the domains that a monastic life actually contains. A method that fails on monks is a method with a gap in it, not a subject with a gap in it.

What this changes for a practitioner

Three things, and they are all corrections of habit.

Read the temple as a building, with the same rules as any other building, and let the five factors carry the weight they actually carry. Do not invert anything; inversion is a story told to explain why mountain sites look strange.

Do not treat the site as the whole cause. An old temple has survived for reasons that include its site, but also its institution, its location and its luck.

And when the subject is a monk or a priest, ask which domains exist before asking whether the chart can be read. Most of the apparent failures in this corner of the field are questions that were never applicable in the first place.