Among classical schools and practitioners there is a big discrepancy between what “personal trigram” or “Ming Gua” you are (if you are female). The personal trigram or Ming Gua is determined based on the year you were born. I always used to call it the Feng Shui equivalent of a zodiac sign. Of course, in Feng Shui we also employ theories directly from actual Chinese Astrology, just to add to the confusion.

With regards to the personal trigram (gua), almost all Feng Shui practitioners will consider the female as having a different trigram than a male born in the same year. Most do not even know about the controversy surrounding this topic. The exception is the Zhen Trigram, the 3 Wood Star people, who are considered the 3 gua whether male or female. These are folks born in 1943, 1952, 1961, 1970, 1979, 1988, and succeeding nine year intervals.

But for others who are not the 3 gua or trigram, it would be different for males versus females and often yield a difference in the categories described as “east” type or “west” type. This is considered an important distinction in the branch of Feng Shui known as Eight Mansion School (Ba Zhai), because from that distinction we get all kinds of recommendations, such as best personal entrance, best sleeping direction, best work-study seated direction, best house orientation and even who supposedly gets along with who in relationships.

Most Feng Shui practitioners are following the conventional Eight Mansion School, created by a famous monk named Yi Xing. In the 8th century, he was ordered by the Tang Dynasty Emperor to create a new branch of Feng Shui and to deviate from the classical teachings for “less than altruistic” reasons. No one will know for sure what happened, but the story goes that this adjusted version of Feng Shui was gifted to the Mongol Empire as a way to sabotage small aspects of their daily lives.

We might think of this as harmless as a master chef changing his famous recipe before it gets published in a food magazine, so as not to release his “secret” ingredients. However, we can also look at it in a more cynical way in that the intent was to really undermine the rivaling populace and inconspicuously ruin their people over time. Maybe this is on par with how modern-day Chinese imports to America seem to be laced with lead!

If we are taking seriously the concepts of good and bad personal directions and how they can be understood to help a person in every facet of their life, we can also assume that if a person was NOT using their best direction, perhaps their worst, unknowingly they could be harmed in a multitude of ways. For males, this is a non-issue. Their personal trigram/gua is the same in either system.

It is the female trigram/gua that has been tampered with. Once I learned about this historical event, I decided to query my female clients about how they identify with their personal trigram and the feedback I got was just a validating for the former system. I now calculate my female clients as having the same personal trigram/gua as a male born in the same year. This is in sync with the equally ancient practice of Nine Star Ki, which is a very nuanced predictive art, and which came from the same origins as Feng Shui. In Nine Star Ki, no changes are made for females born in the same year as males.

This is why if you have read Feng Shui books or looked things up on the internet, you may find your personal trigram listed as something different than what I come up with, if you are female. In fact, in the original system, we also have people who are the “5 Soil Star” and they do not get converted into being either Kun or Gen, as they do in a conventional popular Feng Shui analysis.

I feel confident that I am serving my clients well by using the original system and if it is comforting to know, this detail in Feng Shui is not even as important as other teachings and observations. For example, if a person is sleeping in their best personal direction, but it happens to be under an exposed beam and in a direct alignment with the room’s door, the person will likely not sleep well in spite of it being their best personal direction. The principles of Qi flow would supersede personal best directions.

Author: Kartar Diamond
Company: Feng Shui Solutions (R) Since 1992
From the Health & Personal Matters Series