What Is Feng Shui? Revisited

Translator's note. This opens the practice layer. The foundations volume established what qi is and how it moves; this essay asks the question that everything else depends on — whose fortune is being read. Lü's answer is blunt: not the family's, not the house's, but one named person's, in one place, at one time. The three variables he names here (environment, time, person) recur in every article that follows, and the Mao Zedong example is the clearest illustration in the whole collection of why “good feng shui” is a meaningless phrase on its own.

In the narrow sense, feng shui means the natural environment — every blade of grass, every tree, every grain of sand, every stream.

In the broad sense, it means the relation between people and the natural environment. Its object of study is that relation, and equally the question of how to use and reshape the environment so that it benefits people, letting them move toward the auspicious and away from the inauspicious. The root of an individual's feng shui is the study of one specific person, during one specific period, existing in one specific environment, and the auspicious or inauspicious state of each aspect of that person's life — not the rough fortune of a clan or a household in some environment. Town feng shui studies a settlement and its surroundings in the same rough way.

Ordinarily, when we say “feng shui” we do not mean the natural environment alone. We mean the environment, plus the relation between people and the environment, plus the relation between people, the environment and time.

Real feng shui has two contents. First, the natural environment. Second, time.

Why study the relation between environment and time? Because people live inside both. A person without time is a corpse; a person without space is a god or a ghost. And in fact even gods cannot do without space — in the legend, Chang'e's living environment is the moon palace.

The purpose of studying feng shui is to use environment and time, through an understanding of how the three — person, environment, time — relate, so that we move toward the auspicious and away from the inauspicious. Anyone studying feng shui therefore has to think about those three elements together.

Traditional feng shui studies the environment alone. Seeking the dragon: which dragon is alive, which is dead. Setting the point, reading the sand, finding the water — all of it is natural environment.

Traditional feng shui does also speak of the relation between environment and person, but what it describes is the good or harm a given environment does to everyone. Reading and choosing feng shui ought to be about the good or harm done to one specific person. To speak only of an environment's good or harm to a whole family is wrong; it is not real feng shui. Only the relation between one environment and one person's fate is real feng shui — because a good environment is not good for every member of a clan. Was the feng shui of Mao Zedong's ancestral grave good? For Mao it was excellent. For his brothers and sisters it was very bad. And was it good in every respect for Mao? For his rank, his fame, his social standing, his talent — excellent. For his wealth and his descendants — bad. For his emotional and married life — not good either.

So only when you understand which aspects of a given environment are good and which bad for one specific person have you actually understood feng shui. Otherwise all you can say is that some environment is good for everyone or bad for everyone, and that conclusion is itself false. Everyone says Afghanistan is a bad place — but being president of Afghanistan is not bad. Everyone says America is a good place — but begging and sleeping rough on an American street is worse than a comfortable life in China. A feng shui theory that only says whether a whole environment is good or bad for everybody has, strictly speaking, no value, or very little.

What feng shui should study is whether one environment is good for one particular person. The flaw in traditional feng shui is precisely that it never solved the relation between a specific person and a specific environment. In one house the husband becomes an official and the wife dies. In another, husband and wife both rise and grow rich, and the child dies. Three people live in the same house — why is the difference in their fortune so large? Is that supposed to be good feng shui? If feng shui cannot answer “good for whom, bad for whom,” and only says vaguely that a place is good or bad, it is a fraudulent theory. You would do better choosing a spot yourself than listening to a master of that kind, because such a master is talking nonsense — never mind how fluently. That is also why so many masters ruin themselves.

A friend of mine had studied feng shui for years. When his mother died he did not let his younger brother decide; he found the “treasure site” himself. Then the demolition order came. His brother's house was pulled down and the brother received two flats and 300,000 yuan in cash. His own house was not touched and he received nothing. He wanted some money from his brother, was refused, and sulked. His son is disobedient and cannot even find a wife. His brother's daughter is top of her school. So: if the feng shui you learned is not scientific, then doing feng shui is also blind. When it works out it is coincidence; when it fails it is inevitable. That is the root of why many masters destroy their clients and destroy themselves along with them. Studying feng shui comes down to one sentence: it is the study of the relation between an environment and one specific person. That is real feng shui.

We have to grasp the relation between one person, the environment and time. Why time? We know that an old house may be a hundred years old and have housed several generations — so why did one generation produce a child who became an official and grew rich, while earlier generations produced only ordinary people? And why, among five or six siblings in the same generation, did only one succeed? The house has not changed. So we also have to see which child's own energy resonates with the auspicious energy of that house.

Suppose you want to attend my lecture. If you do not come while I am teaching, and instead come and sit here after I have gone home to rest, you can sit for a month and never hear a single session. It is not the case that I am always here teaching and you can drop in whenever you like. House feng shui works the same way. The feng shui of a house may be very good, but it is not equally good in every minute — and that brings in time. Which is why one can say: every feng shui is good, and every feng shui is bad. More precisely: there is no good feng shui and bad feng shui as such. What matters is whether this person and this feng shui meet, and act on each other, at an appropriate good time or a bad time. The worst feng shui still holds a little good energy; the best feng shui still holds a little bad energy. The good energy can be identified with feng shui theory — but if you do not know when it will act, it is useless to you.

Take Bill Gates. When he started out he had a few partners and shareholders. After the company turned a profit, two of them took a small dividend and sold out. Gates was, in effect, a huge and auspicious feng shui environment. Four people ran into that environment at the same time. Some of them left before Gates had made his tens of billions, and got very little. The shareholders who held to the end were there for his most prosperous moment. That is to say, time is a crucial part of the feng shui environment too; if you study only whether an environment is good or bad and not when, you may as well not study it. It is the same with shares: if your timing is wrong you are always the loser. That is a question of time.

Feng shui and everyday common sense run on the same logic. We need to know where an environment is good and where bad, and also when it is good and when bad, and further, which person at which time can fully match its good energy. Only when all three questions are clear can we actually solve a person's problem.

For someone already born we cannot solve the problem at the root, but to a large extent we can change that person's fate. A man with no ability of his own need not despair — if he sticks close to a capable man, his fate will not turn out badly. The same with environment: a person whose own fate is poor, living in a very good feng shui environment, is like following an excellent man, and will obtain a small measure of wealth and rank.

The greatest effect of feng shui is on those not yet born — those who are born after the feng shui is in place. For those already born it only changes fate to a degree; it will not turn a beggar's fate into an emperor's. We should be rational about this.

Traditional feng shui never solved these three problems in theory. On the surface it discusses liqi, orientation, date selection; it also says this is good for the eldest son, that for the second, that for the third. But in fact its “eldest, second, third” are extremely loose categories, because a clan has more than one eldest son, and more than one second son. It does not follow that because one eldest son became emperor, every eldest son becomes emperor; or that because one eldest son became an official, every eldest son does; or that because one eldest son grew rich, every eldest son does.

The liqi school of Fujian is famous. One master specialised in orientation and the forty-eight configurations, and everyone said he was formidable; many people studied dragon-seeking and point-setting with him. Once, at a yixue conference, I chatted with him and asked whether his theory could determine who would prosper and who would not. He said yes — he could tell whether the first branch of the family (the main gate), the second, or the third would prosper. They believe their method is already accurate. In fact it is not accurate at all; it is a very long way from accurate. To a client it may seem precise, but looked at through logical reasoning and against objective fact, it is not accurate in the least.

Look at it vertically. Grandfather is the eldest son, father is the eldest son, oneself is the eldest son, one's son is the eldest son, one's grandson is the eldest son — five eldest sons in a row. If the grandfather died young, at twenty-eight, are all the later eldest sons short-lived too? Or if the grandfather became a county magistrate, will all five generations become county magistrates? Absolutely not. But to the client, a reading that says “the eldest branch here will produce a magistrate” is accepted as correct — because clients, and most fortune-tellers too, lack dialectical thinking. Nobody stops to ask which eldest son — the grandfather, the father, oneself, one's son, or one's grandson.

Look at it horizontally. Suppose the father has five brothers, and each of the five has five sons. In that generation of cousins, counting the fathers' generation as well, there are six “eldest sons.” Now the eldest son of the eldest brother becomes a magistrate. We declared that this grave makes the eldest branch prosper — correct, the eldest son of the eldest brother did become a magistrate. But what if it had been the eldest son of the second brother? Is the reading still correct? Yes — an eldest son became a magistrate. The trouble is that it was the second brother's eldest son and not the first's. Is your reading accurate? Was it the main gate that prospered or the second? And if it had been the fifth brother's eldest son, then which branch does this grave favour? Such readings are a hundred thousand li from accurate. They mean nothing.

At the very most, traditional feng shui can say “good for the main gate rather than the second or third” — and that is the same as saying nothing. Traditional grave selection is blind selection. If you do well, it is because your own fate is good and your ancestors accumulated hidden virtue. If your fate is miserable, it is because your ancestors did not, and neither did you.

So the study of feng shui must hold tightly to the relation among three things — environment, time, and one specific person. We must always work around those three. That is the correct direction.