Which Directions Want Sand and Which Want Water

Translator's note. This is the lookup table of the school: which of the twenty-four directions want sand, which want water, and which want to be left alone. The original illustrates it with a labelled compass diagram; the diagram has been replaced here by tables. Read the two tables together — the eight-palace summary is the coarse version, the twenty-four-mountain list is the one practitioners actually use.

Every reading of a site, whether a house or a grave, comes down to the same question applied twenty-four times: what stands in this sector, and is that the right thing to have there?

The school answers with a fixed standard. It does not vary by region, by building type, or by the fortunes of the occupant. Twenty-four sectors, three possible verdicts, and the verdict is a property of the sector rather than of the site.

The eight palaces

Start with the coarse grid. Divide the site into eight palaces around the origin point and the rule is:

Palaces	Sand	Water
East, North, South-east, South-west	Auspicious	Inauspicious
South, West, North-east, North-west	Inauspicious	Auspicious

Four want sand. Four want water. The two sets interleave rather than sitting in two halves, which is why the arrangement cannot be reconstructed from memory and has to be learned as a list.

The twenty-four mountains

The working version divides each palace into three, giving twenty-four sectors of fifteen degrees each.

Group	Sectors	Wants
Eight	Ren 壬 · Gui 癸 · Jia 甲 · Yi 乙 · Xun 巽 · Si 巳 · Kun 坤 · Shen 申	Sand
Seven	Bing 丙 · Ding 丁 · Geng 庚 · Xin 辛 · Qian 乾 · Gen 艮 · Yin 寅	Water
Nine	Zi 子 · Wu 午 · Mao 卯 · You 酉 · Chen 辰 · Xu 戌 · Chou 丑 · Wei 未 · Hai 亥	Neither

Eight plus seven plus nine is twenty-four. Every sector is accounted for, and every sector has exactly one instruction.

The first two groups are straightforward: an auspicious feature of the named kind, an inauspicious feature of the other. The third needs care.

The nine that want nothing

The third group is the one that requires care, because it is the group most often read wrongly.

These nine sectors are not neutral in the sense of being unimportant. They are sectors where an imposed feature of either kind does damage. The instruction is to let them be: no built structure, no tree, no water feature, no decorative object placed deliberately.

In practice this is a rule of restraint, and it is more restrictive than it sounds. A reader who treats these nine as "anything goes" will place sand where sand is harmful, and the resulting condition is worse than a merely inauspicious sector, because there is no good version of the sector to return to. The only available state is the undisturbed one.

Who is affected, and how much

Two questions remain after the verdict is given: which person does this sector govern, and how strongly.

Who. The assignment of sectors to people is not part of this table. It comes from the system of positional correspondences by birth order — which relative is fixed to which layer of the site's layout. The same inauspicious sector will bear on one member of a family and pass another by entirely, because they are not positioned on the same point. A sector cannot be read as "bad for the household"; it has to be read as bad for a specific person, and the system that names that person is a separate body of rules.

How much. Two factors set the magnitude.

The first is timing. A sector's condition produces its effect when the annual cycle and the distance factor arrive together. If only one arrives, the effect is present but small. This is why the same feature can sit in a house for twenty years without incident and then produce a run of trouble in a particular year: the feature was always there, the timing was not.

The second is the strength of the feature itself. A five-storey building in a sector and a garden bench in the same sector are not the same amount of sand. The verdict is identical; the magnitude is not.

Using the table

Three cautions, all of them things this table does not tell you.

It does not tell you what is sand and what is water. That determination comes first and is a separate judgement. A kitchen is sand. A bathroom is water. A road is water. A street in a commercial district may be zero. A canal network may be zero. Get the classification wrong and the table will give you a confident answer to the wrong question.

It does not tell you the sign of a complex. A sector is rarely occupied by one thing. When several features of different character occupy the same sector, they combine, and the combination is read as a whole rather than by adding verdicts. The table gives the baseline; the combination gives the reading.

It does not tell you what to build. The nine sectors that want nothing are the clearest case, but the principle is general: this table describes what a site's features do to its occupants, not what an occupant should install to obtain a result. A remedy is a different kind of operation, with its own limits — among them the fact that an adjustment works on the margin, never on the structure.