Eight Mansions

Meaning

The Eight Mansions, Ba Zhai, are a school of Feng Shui and the table at its heart: for each of the eight Kua, the eight directions of the compass, each with a mansion, a name for what that direction is to that person. Four are supportive: Sheng Qi, Growth; Tian Yi, Restoration; Yan Nian, Harmony; and Fu Wei, Stability. Four are challenging: Huo Hai, Friction; Wu Gui, Restlessness; Liu Sha, Entanglement; and Jue Ming, Depletion.

A mansion is a relation, not a place. The same south-east is the Growth of a Kua 1 and the Restlessness of a Kua 2: what a direction is depends on whose it is. Each mansion comes from setting two trigrams side by side, the person’s and the direction’s, and seeing which of their lines differ, so the bond between two trigrams reads the same both ways, and the four supportive directions of a Kua are always the four directions of its own group, East or West.

The school uses the mansions as suggestions for the rooms one lives in: where to sit to work, where to rest one’s head, which door welcomes, which side to keep for storage. It never makes a direction good or bad in itself, and it never asks anyone to move: a room has its own constraints, and a direction one cannot use costs nothing.

In practice

• Feng Shui’s Natal lens draws them on a compass rose, a wedge for each direction with its trigram and its mansion, supportive wedges tinted and challenging ones hatched, and lists them beside it in the two groups of four.
• The practical lines follow from them: a desk facing Sheng Qi, the head of a bed towards Tian Yi or Yan Nian, a front door facing Sheng Qi or Tian Yi kept bright and clear, Jue Ming not faced for long, Huo Hai for storage.
• The home: the Home lens names the mansion the front of the home faces and the one it sits in, for each Kua shown, and whether the house is of the person’s group.
• Two people: the Relationship lens reads each direction for both, supportive for both, challenging for both or mixed, and finds the best direction for what they share.
• The years: the Cycles lens lays the year’s and the month’s stars over the eight directions, so a supportive mansion can be strengthened or asked to rest for a while.

Across traditions

• In India Vastu Shastra also gives each direction a use and a guardian, the north-east for prayer, the south-east for fire and the kitchen, but the same for everyone; the Eight Mansions change them with each person’s Kua.
• In Western astrology the twelve houses also share life out by domains, resources, partners, work and rest, but they divide the sky at the moment of birth, not the compass of a room.
• In the Flying Stars, the other compass school, the directions are read by the stars that move through them with the periods and the years; many practitioners read both, the Eight Mansions for the person, the Flying Stars for the home and its time.

Origin and history

The school takes its name from its classic, the Ba Zhai Ming Jing, the Bright Mirror of the Eight Mansions, a manual of the Qing dynasty, which sets out the eight houses named by their sitting trigrams and the eight life trigrams of their dwellers, with the table that joins them. Its vocabulary is older: shēngqì, the breath of life, is the word the Book of Burial attributed to Guo Pu uses for the qi a good site gathers.

The table can be found from a trigram by changing its lines in a fixed order, the top, the middle, the bottom, the middle, and again: each change gives the next mansion, Sheng Qi, Wu Gui, Yan Nian, Liu Sha, Huo Hai, Tian Yi, Jue Ming, and back to Fu Wei, the trigram itself. The Ba Zhai Ming Jing gives each mansion one of the nine stars of the Northern Dipper and its two attendants, the same names the Flying Stars give their numbers: Tan Lang for Sheng Qi, Ju Men for Tian Yi, Wu Qu for Yan Nian, Zuo Fu and You Bi for Fu Wei, Lu Cun for Huo Hai, Lian Zhen for Wu Gui, Wen Qu for Liu Sha, Po Jun for Jue Ming.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune keeps the classical table, each Kua’s eight directions in the order of the mansions, from Sheng Qi to Jue Ming, and tests it two ways: the bond between two trigrams is the same both ways, and each Kua’s four supportive directions are its own group’s. It follows the line rule above exactly: the same trigram is Fu Wei; only the top line different, Sheng Qi; all three, Yan Nian; the two lower lines, Tian Yi; the bottom line alone, Huo Hai; the two upper lines, Wu Gui; the top and bottom, Liu Sha; the middle line alone, Jue Ming.

Its English and French names describe what each mansion is used for, never what it threatens: Tian Yi is Restoration, not a promise of health, and Wu Gui is glossed as the five distractions. The classical names stay beside them, in pinyin and characters, as the reader’s Chinese settings ask.

Correspondences