How to Read the Compass

Practical applications of almost all Feng Shui recommendations require you to take the orientation of your surroundings. Before you can even start to analyze a plot of land or a dwelling place, you should be completely familiar with the orientations of your surroundings. You should know where all the main cardinal directions are and this should be a specific knowledge. The results of any Feng Shui youdo will be hopeless if you estimate the directions of the land or dwelling based on your recollection of where the sun rises (which you assume to be east) and sets (which you assume to be west). Estimates are usually wrong by as much as 30° to 40° on the compass.

The first step in practical Feng Shui is to buy yourself a good, reliable compass which will tell you exactly where magnetic north is; from there you can then take your bearings and identify all the other directions. As confirmed in The Tools of Feng Shui, a Western compass is just as acceptable as the more authentic looking Luo Pan compass.An accurate Western compass will give you your bearings instantly and certainly fits my own requirements.

Something worth noting is that, irrespective of how the directions are labeled as north or south, in reality north, south, east, or west are easily found with a reliable compass. In the practice of Feng Shui all references to compass directions are exactly that — directions as determined by the compass.

Many Feng Shui place south at the top and this differs from Western convention, which always places north at the top. I am simply following Chinese convention. It does not mean that I have changed the directions. In practice, north is north as indicated by the compass and south is south, also as indicated by the compass. Hence, when you are applying a Compass School formula, you must use the compass. Any method of identifying the corners of your house other than with a compass is to follow another school of Feng Shui.

The next step is to study your compass and note that the angles indicated by the compass are expressed as x° bearing from the north, which can therefore be expressed as 0°. It can also be expressed as 360°, the total number of degrees in a full circle. If we take the eight main directions of the compass we can specify the directions in terms of degrees as shown on the chart below.

Each of the eight directions represents an angle of 45° from the next: 360° divided by eight directions equals 45°.

However, taking directions is quite different from taking locations. The concept of corners and sectors according to the compass will be dealt with a little later. In the application of Feng Shui formulas, directions of doors are not usually expressed in terms of only these eight main directions.

The next step in taking directions for practical purposes requires you to note that each of the eight main directions is further subdivided into three subsections, so that there are three subsections for every direction. This means that the 360° of the compass are expressed in terms of 24 (3 x 8 = 24) different directions, and the “span of each direction” is now no longer 45° but becomes instead 15° (360 divided by 24 = 15).This is shown in the illustration.

From this illustration you can see that when a direction is said to face, for example, south, there are three subsections of south; you must take the exact degree reading so that you can pinpoint the first, second, or third subsection of south. This sounds rather complicated but it is really quite easy to understand if you think in terms of each direction having three sub-categories of subdirections. When you say your door faces south, you must go deeper and find out if it is the first, second, or third subsection of south. The same applies to the other eight directions.

The final step in taking direction from the compass is to train yourself immediately to equate what you read from the compass with what it means on the ground Thus, when we say that each compass direction is further subdivided into three sub- directions, how do we visualize this on the ground?

Think of a large pie being cut into slices, each direction representing one large slice measuring one eighth of the pie. And then think of cutting the slice of the pie further into three smaller slices. Now examine the compass reproduced above.

Note the three subsections of the direction south shown above; they are known as Ping,Wu, and Ting. Like the south, each of the eight directions has three subdirections.

If you think of the compass illustrated above, you will get into the habit of always taking directions with a more accurate eye. This is because many useful Feng Shui formulas are only as potent as your analysis, as well as the way you implement them.

Once you know exactly what you are looking for from your compass, you should be able to read the compass with no difficulty. The illustration shown here actually corresponds to the first few concentric circles of the geomancer’s compass.

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