Wu Gui · Restlessness

Meaning

Wu Gui, 五鬼 wǔguǐ, the five distractions, is the second of the four challenging mansions: for each Kua, a restless direction, read by the tradition as scattered energy and quarrels that start from little. It suggests not facing it for long tasks, the reading of a long book, the writing of a report, a conversation that needs patience.

Ulune calls it Restlessness and glosses its classical name by its meaning, the five distractions, as the Eight Mansions use it: attention pulled in several directions at once, the phone, the noise, the thought of the next thing. Its gift, if a challenging direction has one, is liveliness: a side that suits short tasks, coming and going, a place one passes through on the way to something else. Its difficulty is only that it asks a little more of whoever sits facing it for hours.

Wu Gui is the direction whose trigram differs from the person’s in its two upper lines, always across the groups: Kan ☵ and Gen ☶, Kun ☷ and Xun ☴, Zhen ☳ and Qian ☰, Dui ☱ and Li ☲. So Kua 1 and 8, 2 and 4, 3 and 6, 7 and 9 are each other’s Wu Gui.

In practice

• Long tasks: the tradition suggests not facing your Wu Gui for long tasks; a Kua 1 keeps the north-east for brief ones, a Kua 9 the west.
• What it can hold: a hallway, a coat rack, a corner for exercise or play, things that move and do not ask for stillness, suit it better than a desk.
• The home: when a home’s front or back is your Restlessness, the Home lens says so; the tradition never asks anyone to move, and suggests using your own supportive directions within it.
• Two people: in the Relationship lens a direction can be one person’s Wu Gui and the other’s Sheng Qi or Tian Yi, a mixed direction better for the second person’s own corner than for what they share.
• The years: the Cycles lens reads the year’s stars over this side too, and a supportive star can make it lighter for a year.

Across traditions

• In the Flying Stars Lian Zhen, the star the Ba Zhai Ming Jing gives Wu Gui, is the classical name of the 5 Yellow, the strongest of the nine, which the classics ask to leave quiet when it is out of its time.
• In Western astrology restlessness and sudden change are often read in Uranus, or in a busy third house; Wu Gui is no planet and no house, but a side of the room for a given person.
• In everyday experience a desk turned towards a door, a window on a busy street or a corridor keeps pulling the eye away; the Eight Mansions give such pulls a direction of their own for each person.

Origin and history

The Ba Zhai Ming Jing, the Qing-dynasty manual of the Eight Mansions, sets Wu Gui sixth in its table, second of the four challenging mansions, and gives it the star Lian Zhen. In the classical method that finds the mansions by changing a trigram’s lines one at a time, Wu Gui comes on the second change, once the top and then the middle line have turned.

Its classical name has been translated in ways that frighten more than they explain. Ulune follows the meaning the school gives it, distraction and restlessness, and glosses the name so, as it does Liu Sha’s: the direction is for brief things, nothing more ominous than a chair in a draughty doorway.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads Wu Gui from the classical table of the Eight Mansions, the sixth of each Kua’s eight directions. The table follows the line rule exactly: Wu Gui is the direction whose trigram differs from the Kua’s own in the two upper lines, 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