Feng Shui
Feng shui has made its way into the fringes of Western culture, along with yoga, kung fu, Ayurvedic medicine, acupuncture and a number of other Asian and South Asian cultural practices. But though books on feng shui populate Western book shelves in their dozens, it's not widely known just exactly what feng shui is, nor what it means to the Chinese.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, feng shui is, "The Chinese art or practice of positioning objects, especially graves, buildings, and furniture, based on a belief in patterns of yin and yang and the flow of chi that have positive and negative effects." This is a fairly good definition insofar as it goes, but its brevity necessarily obscures the complexity of the concept.
Renmenbi Ad USA/CanadaEven understanding the term "feng shui" requires quite a bit of definition and explanation. "Feng shui" literally means "wind water" and unless you know about a couple of things about the Chinese language, the term is completely meaningless.
So: a brief lesson in Chinese linguistics. In classical Chinese there was a tendency to use phrases as references to lines of well known poems, as a way to show erudition. In spoken Chinese, there's a tendency to reduce long phrases or place names to two character abbreviations, in much the same way as there's a tendency in English to use acronyms.
With those two things in mind, we can take another look at the term "feng shui" and look a little deeper. "Feng shui" is actually an abbreviation of and a reference to a line from an ancient poem by Guo Pu. The line describes one of the principles of feng shui; it reads, "the qi that rides the wind stops at the boundary of water."
And now we come to the word "qi". "Qi" is a difficult word to translate into English, and in fact people often don't bother. It appears in the Oxford American Dictionary, defined as, "he circulating life force whose existence and properties are the basis of much Chinese philosophy and medicine." In Chinese the word literally means "air", but, again, the literal translation is an over simplification of a complex concept. Dissertations could, and almost certainly have been, written about the concept of "qi", but for our purposes it seems sufficient to say that in the context of feng shui calculations, "qi" means something like "flow of energy".
The goal of feng shui is to build on places with good qi and then, once that's done, design the building so that it doesn't impede the flow of qi. Some locations don't have the proper qi and aren't suitable for human habitation. These places should be left in their natural state.
First, a quick and dirty lesson in ancient Chinese physics, for lack of a better term. The world is driven by two principal forces – yin and yang. There are eight directions – north, northwest, west, southwest etc). There are five basic elements – water, wood, fire, earth and metal. All of these elements have properties associated with them (yin is receptive yang is active; heaven is creative; wood represents awakening etc) and they interact with each and react to each other to produce complex effects on qi, both of the local environment and of the people in it.
The effects of all of these interactions are measurable, using two charts called bagua and a compass. The first (early heaven) bagua represents the sacred unchanging universe and is used to orient graves, temples, and other such sacred places. The second (later heaven) bagua represents the changing universe and is used to orient every day spaces, such as homes and offices. Without getting too technical, the two baguas are divided into eight trigrams – heaven, earth, fire, water, thunder, lake, mountain, wind – each of which has particular qualities and patterns of energy associated with it, and each of which is associated with a direction, though which direction is associated with which trigram differs for the two charts. So, thus laid out and divided the bagua measure interactions between trigrams, the eight directions, the five elements, and yin and yang – i.e. they're used to determine the quality of the qi in a given place. An example of an application of the bagua is as follows: north is associated with water; water extinguishes fire. Therefore, the kitchen should not be located in the north part of the house. (for a full description of all of the trigrams and elements see answers.com insert proper link)
If it sounds complicated, it is. The concept of feng shui and its principles has developed as an integral part of Chinese culture for many thousands of years; there's even evidence of the practice of something like feng shui as far back as the Neolithic Age. These ancient practices were later combined with the principles of Taoism and Taoist views about the universe. Then, during the Han Dynasty (BC 207 – AD 220) the practice of feng shui was recognized as a professional skill and its principles began to be organized and codified into various schools of thought. In the 2000 plus years since then the practice of feng shui has continued to evolve and has risen and fallen in popularity, so that, today there are many different schools of thought and ways of employing feng shui.
In China today feng shui operates on two more or less separate levels. There are feng shui experts with extensive knowledge of the bagua and feng shui principles who can be hired to take extensive measurements of a location's qi and help you design the interior to take best advantage of qi flow. But feng shui is also an amorphous set of basic rules that anyone can apply, and many or most people would not find it necessary to employ an expert. For example, stairs shouldn't face the front door; straight lines and clutter are to be avoided; houses should not be built in front of cemetaries, mortuaries or hospitals; the best location for a house is on a street shaped like a horseshoe etc.
Feng shui is such an old and integrated part of the Chinese way of looking at the universe that it's difficult to separate it from Chinese beliefs about religion, numerology, colors ets. (links to articles here) For instance, each of the five elements (water, wood, fire, earth, and metal) is associated with a color, so in order for the elements to balance, the colors must also balance properly.
Many westerners find the idea that there is some mystical "flow of energy" in nature preposterous and they dismiss the idea of feng shui outright. But the principles of feng shui often reflect what Westerners might call "good sense" (for instance, not building a house by a cemetary, mortuary, or hospital), and compasses do more than just point north; they reflect local geomagnetism, which is itself formed by geomagnetically induced currents caused by space weather. Western science has no clear, concrete idea of how space weather affects us, but it's clear that it can have profound effects on technology (GPS, communication and navigation systems, power grids, etc.). What affect it might have on people is unknown in Western science.
