The room pages on this site keep arriving at the same question. What Is Feng Shui closes its survey of the compass school by naming its two best-known methods — the eight mansions (八宅, bazhai) and the flying stars — and leaving both unopened. The bedroom page points the headboard’s direction question at “the occupant’s mingua”; the home office page parks the desk-facing question at the same term; the front door page defers the door’s favorable sector to “the resident’s own kua number.” Three pages, one deferral: this page is where the deferral ends.
Every room of the house keeps one thing — every room but this one. The bedroom keeps rest, the living room gathering, the kitchen nourishment; the bathroom keeps nothing. Its whole business is to let go: water out, turbid air out, each by its own exit. In the yang zhai (阳宅, “dwelling of the living”) tradition laid out in What Is Feng Shui, that one difference turns the checklist inside out. Every other room is asked to gather and to hold; this one is asked to drain. Where the other rooms fear dispersal, this one fears blockage — so bathroom feng shui does not start with what to place. It starts with whether the exits work.
Most feng shui introductions begin with the eight-direction map — the chart behind “wealth corner” and “career direction.” That map is downstream of something older: eight three-line symbols, each a different stacking of a solid and a broken line — the yin and yang pair — that are the working vocabulary of the I Ching, of feng shui direction-reading, and of Chinese divination generally. The eight trigrams (八卦, bāguà) are what this page lays out: how the symbols are built, the full table of names, images, elements and family roles, the classical passages the table comes from, the difference between the pre-heaven and post-heaven arrangements, and how a trigram is actually read.
The kitchen is the one room whose whole business is food — and in the tradition food was never just meals, it was lu (禄, “salary, earnings”). The bedroom keeps rest; the home office keeps work; the living room keeps gathering; the kitchen keeps nourishment. In the yang zhai (阳宅, “dwelling of the living”) tradition — the branch of feng shui that reads the living house, laid out in What Is Feng Shui — it is also the one room that keeps a live flame year-round, and that flame gives the room its protagonist: the stove is the dwelling’s huo kou (火口, “fire mouth”). Everything a kitchen is asked to do follows from it.
Every room of the house keeps one thing. The bedroom keeps rest; the home office keeps work; the living room keeps gathering; the kitchen keeps nourishment. The front door keeps the coming and going — it is the one place where the house and the world formally meet, and in the yang zhai (阳宅, “dwelling of the living”) tradition laid out in What Is Feng Shui, what passes through it is qi itself. The trade’s name for the door is qi kou (气口, “mouth of qi”): the opening through which the dwelling takes in what it lives on. This page reads the mouth — which way it faces, what it opens onto, and the buffer set just inside it.
The living room is the one room whose whole business is people: the household gathered, guests received. In the yang zhai (阳宅, “dwelling of the living”) tradition — the branch of feng shui that reads the living house, laid out in What Is Feng Shui — each room is judged by its job. The bedroom keeps rest; the home office keeps work; the living room keeps gathering. Its classical name is the bright hall (明堂, ming tang) — and its rules read less like decoration advice than like a seating chart for a meeting.
The study is where classical feng shui put learning, and the home office is the study’s modern name. In the yang zhai (阳宅, “dwelling of the living”) tradition — the branch of the art that reads the living house, laid out in What Is Feng Shui — each room is judged by its job. The bedroom keeps rest; the kitchen keeps nourishment; the study keeps attention. It is the one room in the house where someone is meant to sit still, on purpose, for hours — which is why its rules read less like decoration advice and more like a seating chart.
Feng shui is the Chinese practice of reading and arranging environments — choosing where to build, which way to face, how to lay out rooms — so that a site gathers and holds what the tradition calls qi. It is not one technique but a family of methods with a shared vocabulary, and its name is a job description: feng shui (风水, fengshui) literally means “wind and water,” the two natural agents that decide whether qi stays or goes. This page is the entry point to the feng shui articles on this site: the meaning and origin of the term, the core vocabulary, the two schools that split its method, what feng shui claims and does not claim, and how the practice reached the West.
When a feng shui book overlays a floor plan with a 3×3 grid, or a flying-star chart drops the numbers 1 through 9 into its nine cells, that frame is not the author’s invention. It is the Lo Shu square (洛书, Luoshu, “the writing of the Luo River”) — and beside it stands an older companion, the He Tu (河图, Hetu, “the diagram of the River”), which pairs the same numbers with the five phases. Cited together as one phrase — he tu luo shu (河图洛书) — the two are the numerical layer beneath the more famous charts: the post-heaven trigrams carry Lo Shu digits as their addresses, and every flying-star or nine-palace diagram is drawn on the Lo Shu grid. This page lays out both figures: the legend and the earliest text, the birth and completion numbers of the He Tu, the magic square of the Lo Shu, how the trigrams plug into it, where the two charts surface in practice, and how they differ.
The bedroom is the room classical feng shui worries about most, and it is not hard to see why: it is where you spend roughly a third of your life, and its whole job is rest. Bedroom feng shui is the branch of yang zhai (阳宅, “dwelling of the living”) practice that turns that worry into placement rules — where the bed sits, what it faces, what hangs over it, and how doors, windows, and air move around the sleeper. Read as a system, the rules are a sleep-environment checklist: three placement rules for the bed, a short list of arrangements to avoid, and a classical tradition that wrote bed placement down as its own operation.
