Flying Star chart

Meaning

A Flying Star chart is the portrait of a home in the Flying Stars: the nine palaces of the Lo Shu, the eight directions and the centre, each holding three stars. The period star comes from the home’s period; the mountain star, read for people and the bonds between them, and the water star, read for activity and resources, come from its facing and its sitting. Like a birth chart for a person, it is cast once, for the moment a home was built or last fully renovated, and kept.

It is read in three ways at once. Palace by palace, each pair of mountain and water star has its classical reading, the pairs of stars; over the whole chart, formations say where the period’s stars stand and what patterns run through every palace; and in time, each star is timely, waning or dormant in the present period, and the year’s and the month’s stars pass over it.

A chart is a set of suggestions about how to use a home, never a verdict on it: which side is best kept lively, which quiet, which room suits rest and which work. The classics’ counsel concerns the use of rooms and the timing of works, and nothing is ever to be bought.

In practice

• In the Home lens: once a home has a facing and a year, the chart is drawn as nine palaces, the mountain star top left, the water star top right and the period star below, laid out as the home, front at the bottom, or as the books, south at the top.
• Each palace opens a reading: its stars, their phases and their states now, the classical reading of its pair, and the room you have placed there, if any.
• The year and the month can be laid over the chart: the year’s star on the left, the month’s on the right, small, under each palace’s stars.
• A table lists the palaces with their stars, and the chart’s reading names its formations; near an edge a replacement chart is shown beside the main one.

Across traditions

• A birth chart for a house: Western astrology casts a chart for a person’s moment of birth; the Flying Stars cast one for a building’s, and read the years over it as astrology reads transits.
• Nine Star Ki lays the same nine stars on the same nine palaces for people and years, without the mountain and water stars that make a home’s chart.
• The Lo Shu: the chart is the magic square set moving, its numbers carried round the palaces in the square’s own order.

Origin and history

The chart is the core of the Xuan Kong school. Its classical verses give the stars’ readings in pairs, and Jiang Dahong in the 17th century wrote of the method in veiled terms; Shen Zhureng (1849–1906) set out how to cast it, the period chart, the mountain and water stars and their flight by the mountains’ polarity, with the replacement charts for facings near an edge. The school’s manuals print the 216 main charts, the twenty-four facings of each of the nine periods, and practitioners still check their own against them.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune casts the chart in four steps. The period’s number goes to the centre and flies forward through the nine palaces along the Lo Shu’s path: centre, north-west, west, north-east, south, north, south-west, east, south-east. The number that lands in the sitting palace goes to the centre as the mountain star, the number in the facing palace as the water star. Each flies forward or backward by the polarity of the mountain that holds, in that number’s own palace, the place the home’s mountain holds in its own; a 5, with no palace, flies by the home’s own mountain. Last, Ulune checks the chart for its formations.

An example, the chart below: a home facing Wu, due south, built in Period 9. The period chart puts 9 in the centre and 5 in the north, the sitting palace, and 4 in the south, the facing palace. The 5 goes to the centre as the mountain star and, having no palace, flies by the home’s own sitting mountain, Zi, which is yin: backward. The 4 goes to the centre as the water star; in the 4’s palace, the south-east, the middle mountain is Xun, yang: forward. Both 9s land in the north: double stars at the sitting, with an opposed chart.

Correspondences