Which Floor Is Auspicious?

Translator's note. A short piece that answers the single most common question a Chinese house-buyer asks a geomancer, and answers it in an unexpected order: safety first, feng shui second. The 9/11 observation is not decoration — it is the argument. The second half takes the floor-element theories apart by showing that three respectable systems assign the first floor to water, to metal and to earth respectively.

Our view, in natural-science feng shui, is as follows.

First, safety comes before everything. It is better not to buy high. You must guard against fire, and buying below the fifth floor is preferable. In the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, almost nobody above the fifth floor got out alive. Flooding in buildings is usually not a serious problem; what most endangers human safety now is fire. The Buddha spoke of the four great elements: earth, fire, wind and water. Buddhism holds that when the world is destroyed, it begins with fire, and fire destroys the whole world. I think Shakyamuni may have been right. Without safety there is no feng shui.

Second, the feng shui consideration. When people talk about feng shui they raise the question of the floor: which floor should I buy? Many fortune-tellers say: your chart lacks earth, you need to supplement earth, the fifth floor belongs to earth, so buy the fifth, tenth or fifteenth floor.

But is the fifth floor earth? Not necessarily at all — because nobody has settled what the fifth floor actually is, and the ancients did not know either. Take the first floor. By the sequence of the five phases, the first floor is water. By the bagua numbering qian one, dui two, the first floor is metal. By the structure of the earth, the first floor is earth, because the ground is earth, and all things are born from earth and return to it. So there is no way to say what any given floor is. Since that is so, buy whichever floor you like — that is best.