Huo Hai · Friction

Meaning

Huo Hai, 禍害 huòhài, is the first and mildest of the four challenging mansions: for each Kua, a direction the tradition reads as small frictions and setbacks, the little things that do not go quite right. It suggests that side for storage or a utility room rather than a desk, a place for things more than for people.

Ulune calls it Friction, which is what the tradition reads in it, and nothing heavier: a direction that asks a little more effort, as a door that sticks does, and that a room can use well for what does not need a quiet mind. Its gift, oddly, is its usefulness: every home needs a storeroom, a laundry, a cupboard for the vacuum cleaner, and the Eight Mansions give them a natural place. Where it cannot be avoided for a desk or a chair, it costs no more than any direction one simply uses.

Huo Hai is the direction whose trigram differs from the person’s in its bottom line alone, always across the groups, from East to West or West to East: Kan ☵ and Dui ☱, Kun ☷ and Zhen ☳, Xun ☴ and Qian ☰, Gen ☶ and Li ☲. So Kua 1 and 7, 2 and 3, 4 and 6, 8 and 9 are each other’s Huo Hai.

In practice

• Storage: the tradition suggests your Huo Hai for storage, a utility room or a cupboard; a Kua 1 keeps the west for it, a Kua 2 the east.
• Less suited for a desk: it suggests a desk face Sheng Qi or Fu Wei rather than Huo Hai, a matter of what suits best, nothing more.
• Two people of different groups: when no direction is supportive for both, the Relationship lens finds the best middle ground in a direction that is one person’s supportive and the other’s Huo Hai, the mildest of their challenging ones.
• The home: the Home lens says when a home’s front or back is your Friction; the tradition never asks anyone to move, and suggests using your own supportive directions within it.
• The years: the Cycles lens reads the year’s stars over this direction too; a supportive star there can make it a pleasant side for the year.

Across traditions

• In the Flying Stars Lu Cun, the star the Ba Zhai Ming Jing gives Huo Hai, is the classical name of the 3 Jade, the star of drive and ambition, which out of its time the classics read as quarrels; the same name, a related mood.
• In Western astrology a square of 90° is friction that pushes to act, a tension that can be put to work; Huo Hai is not an angle but a side of the room, and a mild one.
• In everyday building a house is planned with its service rooms, store, laundry, garage, set apart from where people live; the Eight Mansions give the same idea a direction for each person.

Origin and history

The Ba Zhai Ming Jing, the Qing-dynasty manual of the Eight Mansions, sets Huo Hai fifth in its table, first of the four challenging mansions, and gives it the star Lu Cun. In the classical method that finds the mansions by changing a trigram’s lines one at a time, Huo Hai comes on the fifth change and ends one line away from the person’s trigram, the bottom one.

Its classical name is an old word for trouble, and translations have often made it sound worse than the school reads it. Ulune names it for what the tradition actually describes, small frictions, and keeps it as the mild direction the school itself treats it as: the one it sends storage to, and the one the Relationship lens offers as a middle ground.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads Huo Hai from the classical table of the Eight Mansions, the fifth of each Kua’s eight directions. The table follows the line rule exactly: Huo Hai is the direction whose trigram differs from the Kua’s own in the bottom line only, and Ulune’s tests check that the table reads the same both ways and keeps each Kua’s four challenging directions in the other group.

Correspondences