Facing

Meaning

The facing, 向 xiàng, is the direction a home looks out to: in Ulune, the way one looks standing in the main door and looking out, measured in degrees. Its opposite is the sitting, 坐 zuò, the side the home has its back to, the mountain it sits in. Together they set everything the compass schools read in a home: the mountain it faces among the twenty-four, the house’s trigram in the Eight Mansions and, with the period, its whole Flying Star chart.

The classics speak of a home as sitting in a mountain and setting its facing, 坐山立向 zuò shān lì xiàng: the back is where support belongs, the mountain, the front where things arrive, the water. That is why the facing is read with care. A few degrees can move a home from one mountain to the next, and near a mountain’s edge many schools read a replacement chart instead.

Schools differ on which side is the front. Many take the side of the main door, as Ulune does; others take the front of the building, the side that meets the street, the light or the open view, which can differ when the door stands on a side wall. A reader whose door is on a side wall can give the building’s front instead: the facing is simply the number typed or read.

In practice

• Finding it: stand in the main door and look out; hold the phone flat, its top pointing out, away from metal, cars and electronics, and take three readings a step apart. Ulune keeps their average, and asks again when they are more than 5° apart.
• A real compass: a phone near metal can read 20° off, so a compass, or a map’s bearing, is surer. A map’s north is true north; Ulune turns its bearing into the magnetic one a luopan reads, with the declination of the World Magnetic Model 2025 at your chart’s place.
• What it gives: the mountain the home faces and the one it sits in, the distance to the nearest edge, the house’s trigram and group, and, for each Kua shown, the mansions the home faces and sits in.
• Nothing leaves the device: the compass is read only when you ask and only while the page is open; the facing stays while Ulune is open, or in your private space, encrypted, if you keep the home.

Across traditions

• Orientation itself comes from the east, oriens in Latin: Europe’s churches were long built facing east, towards the sunrise, and to orient a building first meant to turn it there.
• Vastu Shastra also reads a house by the direction of its entrance, each of the eight with its guardian; it reads every house by the same directions, where Feng Shui adds the time of building.
• The Form School reads the facing in the land: open ground and water before the front, a hill behind, the landscape the Flying Stars’ charts imagine in time.

Origin and history

Sitting and facing are the first words of the compass schools. Feng Shui read tombs, the yin dwellings, 陰宅, as carefully as homes, the yang dwellings, 陽宅, and both were set sitting in a mountain and facing a direction, read with the needle that Shen Kuo described in 1088. Imperial China built its palaces sitting north and facing south, and the Book of Burial’s ideal site, a hill behind and water ahead, is the classical picture of a good facing.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes the facing in degrees from magnetic north, as a luopan reads it: typed, read on a compass, or from a map’s true bearing less the local declination. From the phone it takes three readings and their circular mean, and warns when they spread by more than 5°. The facing falls in one of the 24 mountains of 15°, counted from Ren at 337.5°; the home sits in the mountain opposite, 180° round, and its house trigram is that of its sitting direction. Ulune then measures the distance to the mountain’s nearest edge: within 3° many schools read a replacement chart, within 1.5° the facing is on a void line.

Correspondences