Flying Star Feng Shui Chart
Feng shui divides traditionally into the form school and the compass school. This page covers the most widely practised method of the compass school, Xuan Kong Flying Star, which lays a period and a facing direction out across nine palaces. The procedure is fully determined and every step can be checked.
Form and compass
The form school reads the shape of the land and the layout of a building. The compass school takes a bearing and works from periods and flying stars. They are not opposed, and most practitioners use both: form sets the broad picture, compass assigns the directions.
The commonest source of misreading in this literature is carrying terms across from one school to the other, because the same term can mean quite different things in a form text and a compass text. Establishing which school a book belongs to comes before reading its rules.
Three cycles, nine periods
Xuan Kong marks time in nine periods grouped into three cycles. Each period runs twenty years, each cycle sixty, and the full round is a hundred and eighty years. The star of the current period is at its peak, the next is rising, and the ones already past are in decline.
The present period is the ninth, running from 2024 to 2043. When a period turns over, the chart of an existing building changes with it. This is the sharpest difference from a purely form-based approach: time is written explicitly into the judgement.
The twenty-four mountains and the facing
The compass circle divides into twenty-four sectors of fifteen degrees each, three to every trigram. A chart cannot be cast until the sitting and facing of the building have been measured.
Taking the bearing is the one step in the whole procedure that depends on a measurement made on site, and it is where error mostly enters. A reading that falls on the boundary between two sectors yields two entirely different charts, so it warrants a careful second measurement.
Period plate, mountain star, water star
The star of the current period is placed in the centre and flown through the nine palaces in the fixed sequence, giving the period plate. The period-plate star occupying the sitting palace is then taken to the centre as the mountain star, and the one occupying the facing palace as the water star. Each flies forward or backward according to the polarity of its sector.
With the three plates stacked, every palace carries a period, mountain and water number. The mountain star bears on people and the water star on resources, and how each stands in relation to the current period star decides how that palace is used.
The four configurations and the annual star
How the mountain and water stars sit relative to the current period star falls into four basic configurations. Identifying which one a building has is the first thing read from its chart.
Over the base chart sits the annual layer: one star enters the centre each year and flies through the palaces, producing temporary shifts. The base chart turns over every twenty years with the period, the annual chart every year, and the two are read together.
How to use it
- Enter the sitting and facing of the building and the period in which it was built, or cast for the current period
- The period plate is laid out, then the mountain and water stars are taken from the sitting and facing palaces and flown
- Read each palace against the four configurations and the current annual star