Reading Sand and Water in the Twenty-Four Directions

Translator's note. The eight-palace table, stated compactly, and the mechanism behind it: four directions deliver ordered energy from sand, four deliver ordered energy from water, and what the body needs is ordered energy. The most interesting sentence is the admission in the second paragraph — the method is right, but its accuracy decays as you use it on more households. That is a more honest claim than the trade usually makes, and it is consistent with everything else in this collection: a surface rule applied to surface features works until the stratum underneath disagrees.

You must be clear on this point, because the 290 configurations make use of it: in the eight directions, and the twenty-four directions within them, is the sand auspicious or inauspicious, and is the water auspicious or inauspicious?

Anyone who has studied the Golden Lock and Jade Gate, or the Guolu Yinyang, will have no trouble here. That basic classification is correct. But if you want to read sites accurately by the Golden Lock and Jade Gate, the more you read the less accurate you become. By the time you have looked at ten thousand households your accuracy will be around forty or fifty per cent. Look at a hundred and it may be eighty or ninety. Look at ten or twenty and it may be a hundred. The auspicious and inauspicious character of sand and water in the eight directions must be memorised.

In the four directions east, southeast, southwest and north, sand is auspicious and water is inauspicious.

In the four directions northeast, northwest, south and west, water is auspicious and sand is inauspicious.

As to why these eight directions differ, we have explained it in class through physics. For a human life to run normally and stay alive, for a person to make money smoothly and rise smoothly in office, the body must obtain energy in ordered motion. If the body obtains energy in disordered motion, then you will fall ill, or lose money, or lose your post, or divorce, or go to prison. The reason we can maintain our state normally is that ordered energy dominates in the body. When disordered energy takes the lead, that person is close to death, or to great calamity.

So, knowing that a person needs ordered energy to be fortunate and disordered energy to be unfortunate, we must ask: where does ordered energy come from, and where does disordered energy come from? By strict reasoning and a modern scientific reading, we know that the energy coming from sand in the four directions east, southeast, southwest and north is ordered energy, while the energy coming from water in those same four directions is disordered. Obtain disordered energy and misfortune is inevitable.

When we look at feng shui scientifically, we can know precisely where to obtain ordered energy and where to avoid disordered energy, and when we can obtain the one and avoid the other. Then we have a real degree of control over our own fate. We cannot, afterwards, change our fate in its essence — but in the acquired environment we can obtain the energy that lets us move up and down within the level our innate environment fixed for us.

Acquired feng shui cannot turn a tractor into an aircraft carrier. But we can change the engine and the tyres on the tractor's chassis, and build it a tin body, and raise its performance substantially. That is the reform of a fate. So the sand-and-water fortune of the eight palaces and twenty-four mountains must be memorised. This is not the place to teach basic knowledge, but you should be able to remember it after one look at the book. Which is why we require those who come to study to know the basics of the twenty-four directions, and to know the ten gods of the four pillars.