Fu Wei · Stability

Meaning

Fu Wei, 伏位 fúwèi, your own position, is the fourth of the eight mansions: for each Kua, the direction of its own trigram, a direction of calm, clarity and personal steadiness. The tradition suggests it for study, reflection and quiet work, a desk where the task is to concentrate rather than to start something new.

Its name means the position one holds, lying still in one’s own place. Of the four supportive mansions it is the quietest: Sheng Qi sets things moving, Tian Yi restores, Yan Nian joins people together, Fu Wei steadies. Its gift is focus, the feeling of being in one’s place; its only difficulty is that too much of it can become routine, and the tradition sets Sheng Qi beside it for the days that need a new start.

It is the only mansion that needs no comparison of lines: the direction’s trigram is the person’s own, Kan in the north for a Kua 1, Li in the south for a Kua 9, Kun in the south-west for a Kua 2, and so round. Two people with the same Kua share their Fu Wei, and with it every other direction.

In practice

• At a desk: facing Fu Wei, your Stability, suits quiet study, the tradition says, as facing Sheng Qi suits new projects; a Kua 1 studies facing the north, a Kua 7 the west.
• Your own trigram’s place: the reading of your Fu Wei direction says so in words, since the Eight Mansions always set Fu Wei there.
• The home: when a home sits in your Fu Wei, its back is your own trigram’s direction; the Home lens names it, as it does for a home facing south for a Kua 1, which sits in its Stability.
• Two people: two people of the same Kua find every direction the same for both, and the Relationship lens says the rooms need no splitting.
• The years: the Cycles lens shows the year’s stars passing through your Fu Wei, and when one of the year’s afflictions asks that side to rest.

Across traditions

• In the Flying Stars Zuo Fu and You Bi, the two attendant stars the Ba Zhai Ming Jing gives Fu Wei, are the classical names of the 8 White and of the 9 Purple, the stars of Periods 8 and 9.
• In Western astrology the Ascendant is a chart’s own point on the horizon, where the self begins; Fu Wei is the compass’s own direction for a person, read on the ground rather than in the sky.
• In the Lo Shu, the number of a Kua and the number at home in its Fu Wei palace are the same: the 1 in the north for a Kua 1, the 9 in the south for a Kua 9.

Origin and history

The Ba Zhai Ming Jing, the Qing-dynasty manual of the Eight Mansions, sets Fu Wei fourth in its table and gives it the two attendant stars of the Northern Dipper, Zuo Fu and You Bi. In the classical method that finds the mansions by changing a trigram’s lines one at a time, Fu Wei comes last, on the eighth change, when the trigram has gone all the way round and returned to itself.

The idea is old in Feng Shui: a person, like a house, has a place that is their own, and from it the other directions are measured. The school gave that place the quietest of names and the work that suits it best, study and reflection, the steady centre from which the more active directions are used.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads Fu Wei from the classical table of the Eight Mansions, the fourth of each Kua’s eight directions: always the direction of the Kua’s own trigram in the Later Heaven order. Its tests check that Fu Wei falls on that trigram for every Kua, and that the table reads the same both ways.

Correspondences