Your lucky directions — feng shui

What decides your four directions — the solar year and your sex

Nothing on this screen is drawn at random. It reads exactly two things: the solar year your birth date falls in, and your sex. The last two digits of that year are added together until one digit is left — call it r. Then one of 4 formulas applies, chosen by your sex and by whether you were born before 2000 or from 2000 onward. The result is reduced to a single digit once more, and that is your Kua (命卦), the number this whole screen turns on.

One result has nowhere to stand: 5. The nine numbers come from the nine cells of the Luoshu (洛書) square, and the fifth is the centre — which is not a direction on any compass, so it has no trigram of its own. A 5 therefore steps aside: to 2 坤 for a man and to 8 艮 for a woman. That is the only exception in the whole calculation.

The eight Kua, and the four directions each one keeps

The 8 Kua numbers fall into two houses. 1·3·4·9 make up the East group, and their four directions are always drawn from North·East·Southeast·South. 2·6·7·8 make up the West group, drawn from Northeast·Southwest·West·Northwest. The two halves never mix: whichever number you get, all four of your directions come from one side of the compass and none from the other.

The four always stand in the same order and each has its own use — that is what the card tells you, line by line, once you enter your birthday. The first of them, 生氣, is also the one that shows up as a single line inside your daily reading, next to your Saju day master and your Nine Star.

This is why the form asks for your whole birth date and not only the year. The solar year turns at Lichun (立春), the start of spring in early February, so a birth in January or the first days of February belongs to the previous year. And because the East and West groups alternate as the number moves, being one year off does not nudge your answer — it can send all four directions to the opposite half of the compass. One honest edge remains: Lichun falls at an exact hour and this screen reads dates only, so if you were born on Lichun day itself the hour decides, and we cannot tell you which side of it you are on.

What this screen does not do. It gives no score, no percentage and no lucky-or-unlucky verdict. It never asks for your birth time and never uses one — these four directions do not move with the hour. It does not read your home: real Eight Mansions work measures a building's sitting and facing with a luopan on the spot, which no browser can do, so we never tell you your house belongs to one group or the other. The tradition names four inauspicious directions as well; we leave those out on purpose. And the same birth date and sex always give the same four directions, because nothing here is drawn by chance.