Kua number

Meaning

The Kua number, Ming Gua in Chinese, the trigram of a life, is the number Feng Shui gives a person: one of the eight trigrams, found from the solar year of birth and the tradition’s yin or yang count. It ties a person to the compass. Each trigram has its place among the eight directions, and from that place the Eight Mansions give four directions that support and four that ask for more care.

There are eight Kua, the numbers of the Lo Shu without the 5, which has no trigram of its own: 1 Kan, 2 Kun, 3 Zhen, 4 Xun, 6 Qian, 7 Dui, 8 Gen and 9 Li. They fall into two groups of four. The East group, 1, 3, 4 and 9, shares the north, the south, the east and the south-east as its supportive directions; the West group, 2, 6, 7 and 8, shares the west, the north-west, the south-west and the north-east. Two people of the same group find the same four directions supportive; two people of different groups find each other’s supportive directions challenging.

The tradition reads the Kua as a guide to where to sit, sleep, work and come in, never as a judgement of a person, of a home or of a bond. A Kua says what suits; the rooms say what is possible, and a direction one cannot use costs nothing.

In practice

• Feng Shui’s Natal lens shows your Kua with the working that gives it, on a compass rose of the eight directions, four tinted and four hatched; without a yin or yang count in the birth, both Kua stand side by side.
• The practice: at a desk, face Sheng Qi, your Growth direction; for sleep, the head of the bed towards Tian Yi or Yan Nian; a front door facing Sheng Qi or Tian Yi suits best, a reason to keep that entrance bright and clear; where you can choose, not sitting long facing Jue Ming, and Huo Hai for storage.
• The home: a house is of the East or the West group by the trigram it sits in; the Home lens says whether it is of your Kua’s group and which of your directions its front faces. The tradition never asks anyone to move.
• Two people: the Relationship lens sets both Kua on one compass, the directions you share and the ones you don’t; the groups say nothing of how you get on.
• The years: the Cycles lens reads the year’s and the month’s stars over your eight directions, and never suggests facing a direction that would put the Three Killings at your back.

Across traditions

• In Nine Star Ki, Japan’s kyūsei kigaku, everyone’s principal number is the star the Flying Stars put in the centre of their solar year of birth; the yang count’s Kua is that same number, except a 5, which becomes 2.
• In numerology the digits of a date are also added up until one is left: the Life Path takes the whole date and reads a character, the Kua takes the solar year alone and reads a direction.
• In BaZi the same yin or yang count sets another thing, the way the luck pillars move, forward or backward from the month pillar.

Origin and history

The Kua belongs to the Eight Mansions school, Ba Zhai, whose classic is the Ba Zhai Ming Jing, the Bright Mirror of the Eight Mansions, a manual of the Qing dynasty. The school joins a person’s trigram to the trigram of their house, named by the direction it sits in, and reads both through the same table of eight directions. Western writers came to it late: Ernest Eitel’s little book of 1873 described the compass and its rings to European readers, and Stephen Feuchtwang’s study of 1974 set out the compass schools beside the Form School.

The classical way to find a Kua counts through the three cycles of sixty years, the three Yuan of the periods. The yang count opens the Upper Yuan, in 1864, with Kua 1, the Middle Yuan, in 1924, with 4, and the Lower Yuan, in 1984, with 7, and goes back one each year; the yin count opens them with 5, 2 and 8 and goes forward one each year. The classics count a man’s birth yang and a woman’s yin; Ulune asks for the count itself, only as an option, and shows both Kua when none is given.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes the solar year, which turns at Lichun, around 4 February, as BaZi does: a birth on 20 January 1990 belongs to the solar year 1989. It adds up the year’s digits until one is left, the same as the year’s remainder by 9, then counts: for the yang count 11 minus that number, for the yin count 4 plus it, reduced again. A 5 has no trigram and becomes 2, Kun, for the yang count, and 8, Gen, for the yin count, as most schools do.

This single rule gives the classical table of the three Yuan year by year, and the shortcuts found in books, for the 1900s the last two digits reduced and taken from 10 or added to 5, for the 2000s taken from 9 or added to 6, come to the same numbers. A birth on Lichun’s own day without a time gets a note: the year, and so the Kua, could be the one before. A birth in the southern hemisphere is counted the same way, as most schools do; a minority of practitioners there shift the seasons or swap north and south, which Ulune notes rather than follows.

Correspondences