Sheng Qi · Growth

Meaning

Sheng Qi, 生氣 shēngqì, the breath of life, is the first and most supportive of the eight mansions: for each Kua, the direction of growth, initiative and new projects. The tradition suggests facing it to work or to begin something, and reads a front door facing it as a welcoming one. On Ulune’s Feng Shui page it is “your best direction”, the step the first read gives after the Kua and its group.

Its name joins shēng, life and growing, and qì, the breath of things. A Sheng Qi direction is where, for this person, things are most easily set in motion: the place for a desk where new work is done, a corner for plans, the side of a room one turns to when starting something. Its gift is momentum. If it has a difficulty, it is only that a direction does nothing by itself: growth comes from what one does facing it, and the tradition sets beside it Fu Wei, Stability, for the quieter work of keeping on.

Sheng Qi is always one of the four directions of the person’s own group, and it is the direction whose trigram differs from theirs in the top line alone: Kan ☵ and Xun ☴, Kun ☷ and Gen ☶, Zhen ☳ and Li ☲, Qian ☰ and Dui ☱. Those four couples of Kua are each other’s Sheng Qi.

In practice

• At a desk: the tradition suggests facing your Sheng Qi for work and new projects; a Kua 1 faces the south-east, a Kua 9 the east, a Kua 2 the north-east.
• The door: a front door facing Sheng Qi or Tian Yi suits best, the tradition says; a door is seldom chosen, so it is taken as a reason to keep that entrance bright and clear.
• The compass rose: on Feng Shui’s Natal lens Sheng Qi heads the list of supportive directions, tinted on the rose and named in each wedge.
• Two people: when two Kua share a group, their Sheng Qi may fall in different directions; the Relationship lens looks for a direction supportive for both, for a desk or a table they share.
• The years: the Cycles lens can show the year’s stars strengthening your Sheng Qi, or asking it to rest when one of the year’s afflictions falls there.

Across traditions

• In the Flying Stars Tan Lang, the star the Ba Zhai Ming Jing gives Sheng Qi, is the classical name of the 1 White; there it is a number that moves with time, here a fixed bond between two trigrams.
• The breath of life is an idea many traditions share: the Greek pneuma, the Hebrew ruach and the Indian prāṇa are each a breath that animates; the Chinese qì is set beside them, never merged with them.
• In Western astrology growth and opportunity are Jupiter’s; Sheng Qi is not a planet but a direction, the same every year for the same person.

Origin and history

The words are older than the school. The Book of Burial attributed to Guo Pu, of the 4th century, says that burial rides the shēngqì, the living breath that moves in the ground, scatters with the wind and stops where it meets water; finding where it gathers is the oldest task of Feng Shui. The Eight Mansions borrowed the term to name the most alive of a person’s directions.

The Ba Zhai Ming Jing, the Qing-dynasty manual of the Eight Mansions, sets Sheng Qi first in its table and gives it the star Tan Lang, the first of the nine stars of the Northern Dipper and its attendants. Its place in each Kua comes from changing the top line of the person’s trigram, the first step of the classical method that finds the eight mansions one line at a time.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads Sheng Qi from the classical table of the Eight Mansions, the first of each Kua’s eight directions. The table follows the line rule exactly: Sheng Qi is the direction whose trigram differs from the Kua’s own in the top line only, and Ulune’s tests check that the table reads the same both ways and keeps each Kua’s four supportive directions in its own group.

Correspondences