Flying Stars

Meaning

The Flying Stars, Xuan Kong Fei Xing, 玄空飛星 xuánkōng fēixīng, are the school of Feng Shui that reads a home through time. Their nine stars are the numbers 1 to 9 of the Lo Shu square, each with a colour, a classical name taken from the stars of the Northern Dipper, a phase and, but for the 5, a trigram: the 1 White, the 2 Black, the 3 Jade, the 4 Green, the 5 Yellow, the 6 White, the 7 Red, the 8 White and the 9 Purple.

The stars fly. Set one number in the centre of the square and the others follow it through the nine palaces along a fixed path, centre, north-west, west, north-east, south, north, south-west, east, south-east, the path the Lo Shu’s own numbers trace from 5 to 4. Time sets the number in the centre: each star rules a period of twenty years in turn, and each year and each month has its star too. A home’s chart lays three stars in each palace: the period star, the mountain star, read for people and the bonds between them, and the water star, read for activity and resources.

The school’s name, xuán kōng, the dark and the empty, is usually read as time and space joined: what a place offers depends on when it is. No star is good or bad in itself. Each is timely, waning or dormant according to the period, and the classics read the same star kindly in its season and with care out of it. Ulune keeps that reading and the school’s gentleness with it: suggestions about how to use a room, never a fear, never something to buy.

In practice

• A home’s chart: the Home lens casts it once a home has a facing and the year it was built or last fully renovated: the nine palaces with their three stars, the mountain star top left, the water star top right and the period star below, laid out as the home or as the books draw it, with the formations that run through the whole chart and a reading for each palace and each pair of stars.
• The stars’ states: the present period is Period 9, ruled by the 9 Purple; the 9, the 1 and the 2 are timely, the 8 waning and the others dormant, and each palace’s reading says so.
• Near an edge: for a facing close to the edge of its mountain, the Home lens shows the replacement chart beside the main one, as many schools read it there.
• The year and the month: the Home lens lays the year’s and the month’s stars over the chart, and the Cycles lens over your own eight directions; in 2026 the 1 White is in the centre and the 5 Yellow in the south.
• What it never says: no star foretells an illness, an accident or a loss; the suggestions are about where to sit, rest, work or keep quiet, and nothing needs to be bought or hung.

Across traditions

• Nine Star Ki: Japan’s Kyūsei Kigaku, the study of the nine stars and of qi, uses the same nine stars, colours and phases for people rather than homes, reading each person by the star in the centre of their birth year and moving them through the same palaces year by year.
• The magic square: the path the stars fly is the Lo Shu’s own, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 2, 3, 4; Western occult philosophy knew the same square as the table of Saturn.
• Zi Wei Dou Shu, Purple Star astrology, uses the same Dipper names, Tan Lang, Ju Men, Lian Zhen, Wu Qu and Po Jun, among the stars of its chart, for a person’s life rather than a home.
• The Eight Mansions, the other compass school, give the same nine names to their mansions: the two schools share a vocabulary and differ in method, the one fixed for a person, the other moving with time, and many practitioners read both.

Origin and history

The nine palaces are old. The Lingshu, part of the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic compiled under the Han, describes Taiyi, the spirit of the pole, moving through nine palaces in the course of the year, and the diviner’s board of Shuanggudui, from a tomb closed in 165 BC, already sets them out in the Lo Shu’s order. The names of the stars came from Daoist star lore of the Northern Dipper.

The method of the Flying Stars was long handed down in secret. Jiang Dahong, in the 17th century, wrote of the Xuan Kong without fully revealing it, and the classical verses of the school, the Zi Bai Jue, the Xuan Kong Mi Zhi and the Fei Xing Fu, speak in images. Shen Zhureng (1849–1906) worked the method out of them and set it down in the form most schools use today; his Shen shi Xuankong xue was published after his death. In the 20th century the school travelled from Hong Kong, Taiwan and South-East Asia to readers all over the world.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune casts a home’s chart by the classical rules, on the device. The building’s period comes from the year it was built or last fully renovated, twenty years a period from 1864; some schools take instead the year one moved in, and Ulune follows the more common rule. The period’s number goes to the centre and flies forward. The number then found in the sitting palace goes to the centre as the mountain star, the number in the facing palace as the water star, and each flies forward or backward by the polarity of the mountain in the same place of that number’s own palace; a 5, which has no palace, flies by the home’s own mountain. Near a mountain’s edge the mountain’s replacement star takes the place of the number going to the centre, a 5 keeping its own.

The states follow the period: timely for its own number and the two after it, waning for the one before, dormant for the rest. A home in the southern hemisphere is read by the same compass and the same stars, as most schools do; a minority of practitioners there swap north and south or shift the seasons, which Ulune notes rather than follows. Its tests check the charts against charts worked by hand.

Correspondences