Terms — Feng Shui Knowledge Database

The central term of the tradition — vitality, breath, and the circulating influence the practice is concerned with.

The pair that every traditional description is built on — the two modes anything can be in.

The eight trigrams — the eight-fold grid the tradition uses to divide a space or a direction.

Living qi — the favourable state, and one of the four directional categories in Eight Mansions.

Hostile qi — the unfavourable condition, usually produced by form or by direction.

The form school — reading a site by its physical shape and surroundings.

The calculation school — reading a site by direction, time and number.

A time-based method that assigns changing numbers to the nine palaces of a building.

A fixed method that sorts the eight directions into favourable and unfavourable for each person.

The personal number used by the Eight Mansions method to sort directions.

The compass — the instrument that carries the concentric rings of the tradition's formulas.

The bright hall — the open space in front of a building where qi is said to gather.

The ridge or landform that carries qi across a landscape.

The point of origin — in site reading, the spot where a building's qi is centred.

The place where water enters or leaves a site, and one of the form school's key observations.

The application of the five-element cycle to materials, colours, shapes and directions.

Door, bedroom and stove — the three features the classical sources treat as primary in a house.