Feng Shui Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Feng Shui (fung seui in Cantonese) is a technique of managing the landscape to maximize favorable circumstances and minimize misfortunes. Although it is uniquely Chinese, it has spread to other east Asian countries, and, very recently, to the rest of the world.

Feng Shui defies categorization. It has been erroneously called magic, science, religion, mysticism, and charlatanry, or “the art or pseudo-science of manipulating the occult forces that are believed to run through a landscape, site, house, or even room.” It is also called “geomancy,” but is does not resemble the ancient Greek and Near Eastern magical art of geomancy.

In Imperial China, Feng Shui built on the experience of billions of Chinese peasants. The roots of Feng Shui are pragmatic perceptions. These include the following guidelines: not building houses or villages in a floodplain or on a steep unstable slope; not building on good agricultural land; growing trees above and around villages for protection from wind and erosion and for provision of shade, fuel, and wood; having a reliable water supply; keeping a village difficult to reach, with a winding path to discourages invaders; encircling a village with hills like a womb, with the highest hills on the windward side, to block winds and storms; no undercutting of a steep slope; facing houses south, toward the warmth and light of the sun; and situating graves relatively far from settlements and with pleasant views, since traditional Chinese believe that parts of the spirits of the dead remain with the bodies.

A further set of rules, again based on common sense, applies within the home. An occupied room should not face the front door; the kitchen should be near the main door, bedrooms farther away; and furniture should not block lines of flow. Rules for room placement and arrangement can get very complicated, but in good Feng Shui practice the arrangements are grounded in practicality.

The “occult forces” concept results from perceptions of early Chinese thought, which seems to have been broadly animist. Every rock, hill, tree, and watercourse had its spirit, often a dragon, magical tiger, or other supernatural animal. These spirits had their own will and intentionality.

These beliefs persist today and do influence Feng Shui practice. Evil spirits travel in straight lines, for instance, hence the be winding paths to the house and blocking direct air routes with trees and religious structures. Failing that, one can set up a pottery model of a fortune-bringing animal on the roof; dragons and Buddhist “lions” are popular. A house must have symmetrical double doors, partly to provide a place to attach the spiritual door guardians. Painted images of Tang Dynasty generals have the power to repel ghostly evil, as the original generals repelled living enemies.

Natural and Supernatural

Wholly impersonal and disembodied forces have also become basic to the system-perhaps in more recent millennia. These forces are “natural,” in that they are fundamental to nature and can be studied and felt without recourse to ritual, worship, or prayer. They are, however, “supernatural” from the point of view of contemporary physics, because they do not exist in any verifiable or measurable way. These forces seemed similar to breath or wind, and thus acquired the name qi, “breath” or “vapor.” Qi is usually a neutral energy or subtle breath running through and animating the world, but good and evil influences are also called qi, though they are different conceptually (at least in rural Hong Kong). Earthquakes, common in northern and western China, and their well-known effects such as mountain-building and valley creation, are credited to qi flowing through the landscape. The Chinese theory of qi is not totally incommensurable with modern theories of plate tectonics; energy does indeed flow through the earth and causes dramatic effects at certain points. While the ancient Chinese could not construct modern plate tectonic theory, they could at least make a start in the right direction through observation and inference.

Inference, however, ran on far beyond observation. People assumed that good luck, bad luck, wealth, health, and other benefits could flow along the lines of qi or be carried by it. Recent tomb finds show that something like Feng Shui was known 2,000 years ago. The logic was: We know that these matters are not under our control, but they must have some pattern and rationale.

Building on all this, Feng Shui experts developed many techniques to determine the lines of qi, the bright and dark forces, and the other unseen influences bearing on a site. They also sought to understand the ways of the dragons, tigers, and other power beings that live in hills and watercourses.

Thus, Feng Shui seems to have begun as grounded in folk-scientific observations, but it was soon mystified with a steadily increasing panoply of religious and magical practices. The result was a blend of science, religion, and magic. However, the Chinese do not see it as a blend, nor was it one historically. To them, it is a single institution and a single knowledge system. The categories of magic, science, and religion are modern concepts that simply do not apply to classical Chinese thought about such matters.

The label “pseudo-science” presupposes some real science to serve as the reference point. Feng Shui in premodern times, however, was not attempting to be a “science.” The tests that would have disproved it had not been invented, and the definition of “science” that would have excluded it had not been elaborated. This sort of folk Feng Shui survives in China, Korea, and neighboring countries to this day. However, the Feng Shui practiced in the Western world today can reasonably be called a pseudo-science, with experts reaping great profits by purporting to use natural forces to bring about certain results.

A system that was once a whole peoples’ best guess at how the natural world worked is now an anachronism, along with alchemy, stable continents, Freudian personality theory, humoral medicine, and countless other ideas that were once the best that people could do to make sense of the available evidence.

On the other hand, we can learn from the sound observations on which the system was originally based. In the floods of June 1966, all the traditional farming villages in the western New Territories were above the water, while all the newer farms were flooded. The new farms, built in an age when Feng Shui was considered “mere superstition,” had been built in floodplains. More recently, China and Korea have urbanized vast tracts of farmland, and now have to import food on a large scale. Feng Shui taught earlier builders to avoid such places and protect farmland.

Similarly, Feng Shui for the home is now a booming business not only in Asian communities everywhere, but even among the many converts among the “host” populations. At best, it is rational planning for the home, based on common sense about lines of flow, arrangement of furniture, assignment of rooms’ functions, and good environmental design. At worst, it is mystification, with unnecessary talk of qi and flying dragons.

Bibliography:

E. N. Anderson, Ecologies of the Heart (Oxford University Press, 1996);
E. N. Anderson, and Marja L. Anderson, Mountains and Water: The Cultural Ecology of South Coastal China (Orient Cultural Service, 1973);
Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (Yale University Press, 2004);
Naomi Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science (Oxford University Press, 1999);
Richard Von Glahn, The Sinister Way: The Divine and Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture (University of California Press, 2004);
Yoon, Hong-Key, Geomantic Relationships between Culture and Nature in Korea (Orient Cultural Service, 1976).