Fengshui

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

In my extensive contact with Chinese culture, fengshui (literally "wind water") is an idea and practice I've come across fairly frequently. In a nutshell, it's a set of urban planning, architectural, landscaping, and interior design rules for the alignment of city streets, buildings, walls, doors, windows, lamps, furniture, and the features of artificial landscapes according the cardinal directions, with the end goal of creating a harmony that maximizes quality of life for the people who live and work in that place. The literature on what exactly comprises and maintains this sought-after harmony can veer off into some pretty abstract philosophical conceits that sets off some people's mumbo jumbo meter in a similar way to a lot of postmodernism. I haven't gone too deep into the finer points of fengshui, especially in the classical chinese treatises on natural law and esoteric spirituality where the ideas have their roots, so I can't say either way.

I will say this, though. I am definitely open to the idea that there may be, relative to the place in question, an ideal way to align man-made structures according to the movement of the sun (and moon, to a much lesser degree) through the sky over the course of a day (and the year), to maximize the benefits of natural light and heat. I could see how this would be especially important in densely populated places like the Huang and Yangze River valleys in the olden days, where urban planning and rural terraforming were rather advanced, frugality was a must, winters were cold, and conserving fuel for light and heat was a grand idea.

Other ancient civilizations have left behind the ruins of buildings, cities, and walls that still happen to catch the sun's rays in certain ways that are unlikely to be accidental. As Western scholar of the occult and mystery schools Manley P. Hall has written about, it is the symbolism of occult practices and the initiation rites of mystical orders worldwide that provide the missing link between bowing down before god, bowing down before powerful people, and bowing down before the sun*. And regardless of how charitably (i.e. theistically) you choose to interpret this deep anthropological connection, there remains an indisputable point relevant to our discussion: The sun is the proximate source of all our energy, and is vital to our very existence. That the sun is mighty to the point of inspiring a healthy fear and awe would have been patently obvious to the citizens of any pre-industrial agricultural society. So why not align your structures in amity with the sun's whims? Why not make the sun as much your friend as possible?

It would be interesting to do a study comparing the perceived efficacy and importance of fengshui among locals in rural Chinese villages without electricity, versus ones with it, controlling for climate.

Religion wasn't once so disconnected from the daily practical realities of the secular world. The idea of natural law, of the universe running like a complex machine built and run by an unseen crew, or cycling through pathways like one complex living organism with a unitary purpose, was for the longest time a friendly and unguarded border between science and cosmology in all ancient civilizations with written language and an indigenous literary and intellectual tradition. I have heard it said that at the highest class levels of ancient civilizations, religion was what we'd probably today call philosophy, while at the lowest class levels, it's something we'd call folk superstition, while most folks would hold dear to something in between, depending on their station in life. This is striking to me, because it gets at what religion is really all about: reconnecting with something yearned for but perceived as lost, in order to regain wholeness. For upper class folks in the ancient world, this perceived lack probably involved spontaneity, meaningful striving for the things that really matter, and a connection to the land and the earth. The idle rich therefore plowed their ennui and world-weariness into heady ideas that they had the privilege of entertaining dispassionately. The peasantry, by contrast, acted out of an acutely felt lack of control over their fates. The spiritual beliefs that trickled down to them from the literati therefore inspired mostly begging, placating, brokering deals [i.e. magick, witchcraft] with the folks behind the curtain, and repetitive rituals to drive away the ever rising tide of worry.

In many places, the indigenous religious practices enshrined real solid wisdom regarding stewardship of the natural environment. In Bali, the shrines and the priests who maintained them were pumping stations and irrigation engineers, respectively. The Dutch did the island no ecological favors by attempting to stamp out the local Hindu-styled (but likely far older and mostly indigenous) local religion. Likelwise, rural villages in Japan have each maintained a satoyama for as long as anyone can remember, and the indigenous religion holds that the satoyama is a place where benevolent spirits frolic and convene, and it's by maintaining these gathering places that mankind maintains a balance, and a diplomatic buffer, between himself and nature. Interestingly enough, a satoyama is a huge community garden slash tree plantation on the south face of the hill closest to the village, with plants, grasses, and trees strategically arranged in descending order by height from north to south, and interspersed in a way that maximized mutual protection and soil enrichment between plant types. In smaller villages in choice farming areas, a well-kept and sustainably-harvested satoyama could render the citizens nearly self-sufficient in food and raw materials they'd need, at least until the next inevitable natural disaster.

It wouldn't surprise me if fengshui were part of China's contribution to this "practical religion" phenomenon, and as such might have something to it of value, even when divorced from China's indigenous supernatural beliefs.

Thoughts? Experiences?

 

[-=SS=-]

Interesting post. I'd heard of Fengshui but just assumed it was about reorganizing your rooms to be less offensive to the mind.. obviously that was a bastardized Western interpretation I heard at some point then.

I really like the idea of hooking into the natural wheel work of nature to extract a positive influence, reminds me of Nikola Tesla and his ideas but in a different mode, but the alignment of buildings and especially how to go about planting/food/landscaping really interests me (I'm studying Landscape Architecture). Definitely something I think we should be incorporating back into the design of our urban infrastructure. If you can't meet nature and invite her into your design, like Chinese pagodas that resonate with earthquakes, she will simply step in on her own terms often destructively. The way we've constructed our modern urban fabric has been very haphazard and we'll have to reorganize at some point I think.

Definitely a firm believer that people of the past were tuned into things we can not see today, simply because we do not spend enough time in nature let alone observing what is actually there. As a side note I find the observations of Viktor Schauberger very interesting, an Austrian forest caretaker who noticed many things with forests and water systems that others would never see. His philosophy was very Fengshui.. we have to work with natures principles, observe and copy, or face potential catastrophe.

EDIT: Just been watching a Viktor. S video again, @ 12:10 onwards it's talking about designing with rivers from within, working with its flows, as opposed to conventional hydrology which leaves river banks vulnerable as these man made designs do not work with the natural flow. Seems pretty fengshui to me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItsSYwTSnTY

Would love to know more about Fengshui.. no experiences with it personally though.

 

[Foreigner]

A friend of mine is working on a big publication about the Qin Emperor's palance in Xi'an, China... as well as all of his subsequent structures. When the Qin Emperor came to power he burned books that for his time were the equivalent to the ancient books we have now from his time. In other words, very very old. The Qin Dynasty used knowledge of cosmological alignments, what Tesla would later call ley lines, as well as other configurations that are completely unknown to us now. This was all done to enhance the healthy qi dynamic of humans. The Qin burial mound and regional structures are all in alignment with key star systems, and some structures point to stars that would not have been visible with the technology they had back then, but for some reason they knew about them.

The pyramids at Giza used to be lined with white lime stone and had sealed apexes lined with gold. Given that the Nile Delta used to be much closer to the pyramid portion of the Giza plateau, there would have been dense aquifers under those pyramids conducting telluric energy from the ground into the pyramids. They were energetic insulators, basically. The field generated might have created electricity, or another kind of bio-available energy that we've lost touch with today. I met an alternative historian professor in Asia who said most most of his colleagues agree that based on how the ancient world tended to operate, the energy being gathered was likely used for human activities such as healing and heightening of consciousness. Part of the problem is how we interpret everything ancient through the modern lens. It's true that many of the pyramids that came later were to bury emperors in, but the pyramids at Giza are much, much older and there's nothing aesthetically relevant inside them that points to ritual burial.

Fengshui as it's practiced today, even by traditionalists, is watered down. The ancient form would've been superior. I've used it to the best of my ability in my city apartment, but it's difficult with all of the modern technology energy fields running amuck. Mark my words, in 50 years we will know that power transformers and wifi cause health problems. Fengshui is about utilizing positioning, structuring, and an understanding of qi conductivity to arrange human dwellings into the most healthy configurations possible in accordance with earth fields. It's not merely about making things look good. Most U.S. state capitals and especially the Federal capital used ley lines and proper positioning to place their power structures on, and that's based on the masonic understanding which is only about 600 years old or so.