We are increasingly responding to messages you send us about the (un)favorable areas of your home and your good directions. The confusion is great when it comes to Ba Zhai 八宅, or Eight Mansions Feng Shui. Very often, one might think that our good or bad directions, calculated according to the Ming Gua 命卦, our Life Gua (which is determined according to our date of birth), also gives us the favorable or unfavorable areas of our home. And it is not!

The classical texts, 地理全成連環記 a compilation of Feng Shui key texts on Di Li (which could be translated in a modern way by the term geography) published in 1739 by Zhang Bing Lin, and the Ba Zhai Ming Jing 八宅明鏡 (Eight Mansions Bright Mirror) published in 1790 by Gu Wulu during the Qing Dynasty, give us the necessary information to understand this system.

In fact, when we talk about the Life Gua 命卦, these are the directions we are talking about, the ones you should face or avoid facing. This has nothing to do with the favorable or unfavorable areas of your home. This one has its own Gua 宅卦, which is calculated according to its sitting direction (opposite to the facing), and it is the House Gua 宅卦 who will then give us the energy map of the home with the favorable and unfavorable sectors. And those are valid for all residents within the same house. So whatever your Life Gua 命卦 is, or your partner’s or your children’s Gua, the same areas will be favorable or unfavorable to everyone inside the house. We are talking here about locations, valid for each of us within a house. Within these locations, you can then use your good directions to position yourself (desk, headboard, stove, sofa, armchair, …)

There are therefore eight types of energy maps for our homes according to the Ba Zhai, and those are calculated according to the sitting of the house:

Kan 坎 House: Sitting North (facing South)

Gen 艮 House: Sitting Northeast (facing Southwest)

Zhen 震 House: Sitting East (facing West)

Xun 巽 House: Sitting Southeast (facing Northwest)

Li 離 House: Sitting South (facing North)

Kun 坤 House: Sitting Southwest (facing Northeast)

Dui 兌 House: Sitting West (facing East)

Qian 乾 House: Sitting Northwest (facing Southeast)

The purpose of this system is to determine the proper locations for the various parts of the house and also to determine the ideal location of the main door (through which the Qi enters). However, as always in Feng Shui, the environment overrides the formulas and the presence of Sha Qi (unfavorable forms outside and inside the house) has an impact on the quality of the Qi present in the different sectors. Ideally, a person from the West group (see Life Gua 命卦) should live in a West group house and same thing for those in the East group in an East house.

Once the sitting of your house has been determined, refer to the chart below for its energy map.