Feng shui

thumb|Overhead photograph of the 177 CE earthenware residential feng shui rectification practice pottery basin with the [[Big Dipper#Asian traditions|Seven Stars, Eight Trigrams, vermilion script, and small white specks unearthed in 1983 in Linyi, Shanxi.]]

Feng shui ( or ) is a traditional form of geomancy that originated in ancient China. The term feng shui means, literally, "wind-water" (i.e., fluid). From ancient times, landscapes and bodies of water were thought to direct the flow of the universal qi – "cosmic current" or energy – through places and structures. More broadly, feng shui includes astronomical, astrological, architectural, cosmological, geographical, and topographical dimensions.

Historically, and in many parts of the contemporary Chinese world, feng shui has been used to determine the orientation of buildings, dwellings, and spiritually significant structures such as tombs.

Feng shui's global uptake during the modern era has been complex. Its host of modern detractors has been very diverse, ranging from 16th-century Jesuit missionaries to the Chinese communist revolutionaries of the 20th century. Regarding its adoption within contemporary Western societies, one scholar writes that "feng shui tends to be reduced to interior design for health and wealth. It has become increasingly visible through 'feng shui consultants' and corporate architects who charge large sums of money for their analysis, advice and design." In Western philosophy of science, feng shui is generally regarded as non-scientific, while some scientific skeptics have more narrowly classified it as a pseudoscience.

History

Origins

The Yangshao and Hongshan cultures provide the earliest known evidence for the use of feng shui. Until the invention of the magnetic compass, feng shui relied on astronomy to find correlations between humans and the universe.

In 4000 BC, the doors of dwellings in Banpo were aligned with the asterism Yingshi just after the winter solstice—this sited the homes for solar gain. During the Zhou era, Yingshi was known as Ding and was used, according to the Shijing, to determine the auspicious time for constructing a capital city. The late Yangshao site at Dadiwan (c. 3500–3000 BC) includes a palace-like building (F901) at its center. The building faces south and borders a large plaza. It stands on a north–south axis with another building that apparently housed communal activities. Regional communities may have used the complex.

A grave at Puyang (around 4000 BC) that contains mosaics—a Chinese star map of the Dragon and Tiger asterisms and Beidou (the Big Dipper, Ladle or Bushel)—is oriented along a north–south axis. The presence of both round and square shapes in the Puyang tomb, at Hongshan ceremonial centers and at the late Longshan settlement at Lutaigang,

suggests that gaitian cosmography (heaven-round, earth-square) existed in Chinese society long before it appeared in the Zhoubi Suanjing.

Cosmography that bears a resemblance to modern feng shui devices and formulas appears on a piece of jade unearthed at Hanshan and dated around 3000 BC. Archaeologist Li Xueqin links the design to the liuren astrolabe, zhinan zhen and luopan.

Beginning with palatial structures at Erlitou, all capital cities of China followed rules of feng shui for their design and layout. During the Zhou era, the Kaogong ji (; "Manual of Crafts") codified these rules. The carpenter's manual Lu ban jing (; "Lu ban's manuscript") codified rules for builders. Graves and tombs also followed rules of feng shui from Puyang to Mawangdui and beyond. From the earliest records, the structures of the graves and dwellings seem to have followed the same rules.

Early instruments and techniques

thumb|A feng shui [[spiral at Chinatown station (Los Angeles Metro)]]

Some of the foundations of feng shui go back more than 3,500 years before the invention of the magnetic compass. It originated in Chinese astronomy. Some current techniques can be traced to Neolithic China, while others were added later (most notably the Han dynasty, the Tang, the Song, and the Ming).

The astronomical history of feng shui is evident in the development of instruments and techniques. According to the Zhouli, the original feng shui instrument may have been a gnomon. Chinese used circumpolar stars to determine the north–south axis of settlements. This technique explains why Shang palaces at Xiaotun lie 10° east of due north. In some of the cases, as Paul Wheatley observed, they bisected the angle between the directions of the rising and setting sun to find north. This technique provided the more precise alignments of the Shang walls at Yanshi and Zhengzhou. Rituals for using a feng shui instrument required a diviner to examine current sky phenomena to set the device and adjust their position in relation to the device.

The oldest examples of instruments used for feng shui are liuren astrolabes, also known as shi. These consist of a lacquered, two-sided board with astronomical sightlines. The earliest examples of liuren astrolabes have been unearthed from tombs that date between 278 BC and 209 BC. Along with divination for Da Liu Ren the boards were commonly used to chart the motion of Taiyi (Pole star) through the nine palaces. The markings on a liuren/shi and the first magnetic compasses are virtually identical.

The magnetic compass was used for feng shui since its invention. Traditional feng shui instrumentation consists of the luopan or the earlier south-pointing spoon ( zhinan zhen)—though a conventional compass could suffice if one understood the differences. Not to be confused with the South-pointing chariot which was used for navigation. A feng shui ruler (a later invention) may also be employed.

Imperial court usage

From at least the Han dynasty, feng shui was formally integrated into Chinese imperial governance, with court officials conducting geomantic assessments for the siting of palaces, capital cities, and imperial tombs. The practice reached its institutional peak during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties, when the Qintianjian (欽天監, Imperial Astronomical Bureau) employed specialists in feng shui alongside astronomers and calendar-makers. Major imperial projects including the Forbidden City and the Ming tombs were designed in accordance with feng shui principles, with the Forbidden City's north–south axial alignment and the placement of the artificial hill of Jingshan to its north reflecting classical geomantic conventions. The imperial court's control over geomantic knowledge served both practical and political functions, as the proper siting of state structures was understood as a demonstration of the ruling dynasty's claim to the Mandate of Heaven.

Later history

After the Song dynasty, divination began to decline as a political institution and instead became an increasingly private affair. Many feng shui experts and diviners sold their services to the public market, allowing feng shui to quickly grow in popularity.

Under China's Century of Humiliation, feng shui began to receive implicit government encouragement as a method of colonial resistance. Through the militarization of the countryside, the local gentry used feng shui to justify and promote popular attacks against missionaries and colonial infrastructure. This allowed local elites and government officials to bypass foreign extraterritoriality and maintain local sovereignty. This, in addition to the cultural aspects of feng shui, made the practice a powerful expression of demarcation between foreign and Chinese identities.

It was only after China's reform and opening up that feng shui would see a complete resurgence. As economic liberalization promoted social competition and individualism, feng shui was able to find new footing due to its focus on individualism and amoral justification of social differences. This involves the management of qi, an imagined form of cosmic "energy." In situating the local environment to maximize good qi, one can optimize their own good fortune. A goal of the practice is to achieve a "perfect spot", a location and an axis in time that can help one achieve a state of shū fú () or harmony with the universe. As a set of consistent rules, feng shui can facilitate collective consensus on development without the need of centralized leadership. Understanding that one's actions could damage the feng shui and fortunes of the entire village, individuals were incentivized to know these rules and carefully manage the development of their land and resources. This served to prevent the Tragedy of the Commons. When conflict did erupt during development, feng shui experts played an important role in balancing interests and enforcing orderly development. For many communities, feng shui is a method to extract proper deference and compensation from the government. Chinese academics permitted to research feng shui are anthropologists or architects by profession, studying the history of feng shui or historical feng shui theories behind the design of heritage buildings. They include Cai Dafeng, vice-president of Fudan University. Learning in order to practice feng shui is still somewhat considered taboo. Nevertheless, it is reported that feng shui has gained adherents among Communist Party officials according to a BBC Chinese news commentary in 2006, and since the beginning of the reform and opening up the number of feng shui practitioners is increasing.

Feng shui practitioners in China have found officials that are considered superstitious and corrupt easily interested, despite official disapproval. In one instance, in 2009, county officials in Gansu, on the advice of feng shui practitioners, spent $732,000 to haul a 369-ton "spirit rock" to the county seat to ward off "bad luck". Feng shui may require social influence or money because experts, architecture or design changes, and moving from place to place is expensive. Less influential or less wealthy people lose faith in feng shui, saying that it is a game only for the wealthy. Others, however, practice less expensive forms of feng shui, including hanging special (but cheap) mirrors, forks, or woks in doorways to deflect negative energy.

First Western reactions

Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), one of the founding fathers of Jesuit China missions, may have been the first European to write about feng shui practices. His account in De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas tells about feng shui masters (geologi, in Latin) studying prospective construction sites or grave sites "with reference to the head and the tail and the feet of the particular dragons which are supposed to dwell beneath that spot." As a Catholic missionary, Ricci strongly criticized the "recondite science" of geomancy along with astrology as yet another superstitio absurdissima of the heathens: "What could be more absurd than their imagining that the safety of a family, honors, and their entire existence must depend upon such trifles as a door being opened from one side or another, as rain falling into a courtyard from the right or from the left, a window opened here or there, or one roof being higher than another?"

Victorian-era commentators on feng shui were generally ethnocentric, and as such skeptical and derogatory of what they knew of feng shui. In 1896, at a meeting of the Educational Association of China, Rev. P. W. Pitcher railed at the "rottenness of the whole scheme of Chinese architecture," and urged fellow missionaries "to erect unabashedly Western edifices of several stories and with towering spires in order to destroy nonsense about fung-shuy."

Criticism amid global spread

Critics charge that feng shui has been reinvented and commercialized by New Age entrepreneurs, or are concerned that much of the traditional theory has been lost in translation, not given proper consideration, frowned upon, or scorned. One critic called the situation of feng shui in today's world "ludicrous and confusing," asking "Do we really believe that mirrors and flutes are going to change people's tendencies in any lasting and meaningful way?" He called for much further study or "we will all go down the tubes because of our inability to match our exaggerated claims with lasting changes." Robert T. Carroll sums up the charges:

<blockquote>...feng shui has become an aspect of interior decorating in the Western world and alleged masters of feng shui now hire themselves out for hefty sums to tell people such as Donald Trump which way his doors and other things should hang. Feng shui has also become another New Age "energy" scam with arrays of metaphysical products...offered for sale to help you improve your health, maximize your potential, and guarantee fulfillment of some fortune cookie philosophy.</blockquote>

Skeptics charge that evidence for its effectiveness is based primarily upon anecdote and users are often offered conflicting advice from different practitioners, though feng shui practitioners use these differences as evidence of variations in practice or different branches of thought. A critical analyst concluded that "Feng shui has always been based upon mere guesswork." Another objection was to the compass, a traditional tool for choosing favorable locations for property or burials. Critics point out that the compass degrees are often inaccurate because solar winds disturb the electromagnetic field of the Earth. Magnetic North on the compass will be inaccurate because true magnetic north fluctuates.

The psychologist Stuart Vyse has called feng shui "a very popular superstition."

The American magicians Penn and Teller dedicated an episode of their television show Bullshit! to criticize the acceptance of feng shui in the Western world as science. They devised a test in which the same dwelling was visited by five different feng shui consultants: each produced a different opinion about the dwelling, showing there is no consistency in the professional practice of feng shui.

Feng shui is criticized by Christians around the world. Some have argued that it is "entirely inconsistent with Christianity to believe that harmony and balance result from the manipulation and channeling of nonphysical forces or energies, or that such can be done by means of the proper placement of physical objects. Such techniques, in fact, belong to the world of sorcery."

The usage of inward-swinging doors in the former Ozone Disco in the Philippines, due to feng shui belief that these "bring in money", has been blamed as a major factor on the huge number of deaths from the worst fire in the Philippine history, which occurred in 1996.

Reception within Western scientific philosophy

Feng shui has been identified as both non-scientific by both scientists and philosophers, while some have gone further to describe it as a paradigmatic example of pseudoscience. This has been because feng shui's characteristic geomantic claims are not amenable to test by the scientific method.

References

Sources

Books

, various years, vol I-II-III-IV-V-VI
.
. Includes translations of Archetypal burial classic of Qing Wu; The inner chapter of the Book of burial rooted in antiquity ; The yellow emperor's classic of house siting; Twenty four difficult problems; The secretly passed down water dragon classic.
, length=616 pages ## 71
, length=150 pages
Dover reprint ISBN 0-486-28092-6
, length=440, Review= https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.1445553

Theses

Articles and chapters

Blogs and online

Web

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https://www.cambridge.org/core/search?filters%5BauthorTerms%5D=Stephen%20Field%20&eventCode=SE-AU

Review: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian-studies/article/abs/culture-of-fengshui-in-korea-an-exploration-of-east-asian-geomancy-by-yoon-hongkey-lanham-md-lexington-books-2006-xvi-331-pp-7500-cloth/DC5B8D6801561EA7C0605AECCA49DC48

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practitioner, turned to dowsing.
not really archived. Moreover, the sentence to be proven is rather void

Miscellaneous

Traditional China

. The "Ming Sizong robbed Li Zicheng's ancestral grave" section can be read at

Post-1949 China

2001:
2006:
2010:
2013:

United States

2005: