In the Beginner’s course materials (Companion File), I give a description of a formula for houses, which is not the regular flying star chart used universally by Xuan Kong Fei Xing practitioners. It is a simpler formula, which does not require factoring in the age of the house or building. This application was taught to me in a beginner’s class before the more popular and standard method where the Construction Period is taken into consideration. This same method does not need to use the 24 possible orientations either, just eight directions.

We refer to a lot of specific energies as “stars” in Feng Shui, such as the mountain star and water star which are produced with a regular flying star chart. In our school, we get into that material in the Intermediate course. You are introduced to an annual star right in the Beginner’s course because it is easier to teach and it drives home the message that energies are always in flux and not stagnant.

The definition of the House Trigram Number is the numerical coding we give to a house based on its orientation alone. This is similar to the Ba Zhai (Eight House) School, where there are eight orientations a house can have. They represent the four cardinal directions of North, South, East and West. And the other four directions are the sub-cardinals of Northeast, Southeast, Southwest and Northwest.

Feng Shui, as a whole, is drenched in symbolism and theories regarding the eight basic directions. But the House Trigram Number (Star) yields a very different slice of information than the Eight House or Eight Mansion School. I suspect that one method evolved from the other, in spite of their glaring differences.

Both methods use the sitting sector as the initial piece of information to start with, not the facing sector, and this is the case with most feng shui applications. There are some exceptions to the rule, discussed in more advanced materials. No matter what, it becomes obvious that in order to do any of these calculations, you have to be able to recognize sitting from facing. It is not always 100% obvious.

If it is a given that a house sits (back to) North, we call it a Kan House and the number associated with the Kan Trigram is 1. Therefore, we take the 1 star to the center cell of our gridding format. We then “fly the stars” in the order that virtually all applications use: from center, to NW, to W, to NE, to S, to N, to SW, to E, to SE.

If a house sits SW, we start with the #2
If a house sits East, we start with the #3
If a house sits SE, we start with the #4
If the house sits NW, we start with the #6
If the house sits West, we start with the #7
If the house sits NE, we start with the #8
If the house sits South, we start with the #9

We never start with a #5 because the 5 star represents “center” and no house can “sit” in the center direction.

Once you have those stars mapped out through all the directions in an ascending pattern, then you can add the annual star and create a pairing of stars to work with. This technique could be used, just to glean another layer of information, or when you absolutely do not have a clue as to when a structure was built. This hardly ever happens, but I did come upon a reason to use this simpler technique this very week that I have written this article. Why?

I have a client who has bought another house, without using my house hunting services unfortunately. I can say happily that most of the people I work with develop a keen understanding of Feng Shui’s capabilities after their first consultation. And if they decide to move years later, they hire me to help them in the house hunting process. Why move, unknowingly, to a house that will be problematic, and in ways difficult to remedy?

The house in question was built in 1907. However, the previous owner made a comment about how he thinks the house was moved from its original location. When a house is moved, we re-calculate the flying star chart for the house based on WHEN it was moved to another location, and in conjunction with its new orientation. It is possible for a house to be moved in the same Period it was built and end up facing the same direction, but statistically unlikely.

The house in question was built in Period 3, but it could have been moved in Period 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7. So there are 5 different possible Periods to consider. There don’t seem to be any official records with the Department of Building and Safety, nor the Tax Assessor’s office. This is unusual. I do think it is possible that this house may have been built on its current location in 1907, all by itself for a while. However, houses on either side and behind it have been confirmed as built anywhere from 1927, 1940, 1957, etc. So, that area developed over time, instead of like tract homes or developments where all the adjacent houses were built within a year or two of each other.

Next, there is also an indecisive compass reading for this house. It straddles two different sectors of Northeast. We have advanced materials on the Border line Compass Reading. When there is a borderline compass reading, there can be up to four different charts just based on that. If we multiply 4 different possible charts, by 5 different possible Construction Periods, we get twenty different flying star charts! And I can guarantee that all the charts will contradict each other. This would be like comparing twenty different astrology charts for a person when we don’t know that exact time or place of birth.

The house in question is actually very complicated to figure out on the unseen level. At least the shape of the house and the environment are mostly normal and inconsequential. So, this is a good example of using the House Trigram Number formula, instead of driving yourself crazy comparing so many different charts. Using the House Trigram Number is more generic in terms of directional boundaries and it does not need to factor in the age of the house. Am I happy about using a simpler formula? No.

But at least we can address one level of the house’s non-obvious energy blueprint. What I am also doing with this real client is asking them to dig deeper into the history of the house. The husband is a builder and planning on remodeling it. He may ultimately get access to records showing whether or not the house was moved and when.

Author: Kartar Diamond
Company: Feng Shui Solutions ®
From the For My On-Line Students Blog Series