Feng Shui · Kua Directions
The Eight Mansions method finds your Kua number — and the four directions that sit well with you.
The Eight Mansions method finds your Kua number — and the four directions that sit well with you.
Your 八宅 (Eight Mansions) Kua number from your birth year and sex, and your four personal directions in the traditional order: prosperity, health, relationships, and stability.
Your birth year is first corrected to the solar year — it turns at Lichun in early February, not January 1st — then reduced by digit sum and run through the classic male/female Kua formula. Kua 1, 3, 4, 9 fall in the East group and 2, 6, 7, 8 in the West group; each group maps to a fixed direction table (八宅法).
We compute your personal Kua only — placing furniture or doors by compass needs an on-site luopan reading we don't do. Directions are something to lean toward, never a rule to obey.
The Kua formula also needs your sex, and the solar year it's based on turns at Lichun in early February — someone born in January can still belong to the previous solar year, which a simple age guess would miss.
No — this gives your personal Kua-based directions only. Placing doors or furniture by compass needs an on-site luopan reading, which this tool doesn't do.
Every direction this page gives you is read off a single number, and there are only eight of them: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9. There is no ninth and nothing in between. Men and women do not draw from different sets either: over the birth years 1900 to 2100 a man's dates produce eight distinct numbers and a woman's produce eight, and every number on one list is on the other. Your Kua is not a summary of your answer; it is the answer. The four directions underneath it are read straight off it, which is why any two people who land on the same number get the same four directions with the same job on each.
The same answer comes back every nine years. We compared every pair of birth years nine apart across 1900 to 2100: 191 of the 192 pairs land on the identical Kua, for both sexes. Someone born nine years before you, of the same sex, gets your number, your house, your four directions and the same job on each of them. The one pair that breaks is 2091↔2100, where the two digits the formula reads roll back to zero.
That return survives a change of formula, which is the part worth pausing on. The calculation splits at 2000: the arithmetic a man runs on his birth year before 2000 is not the one he runs from 2000 onward, and the same is true for a woman. A seam like that is where a cycle usually breaks. This one does not. 1999 and 2008 sit on opposite sides of the split and still agree — Kua 1 for a man, Kua 8 for a woman.
Inside those nine years there are eight answers, not nine. Walk any nine consecutive birth years and all eight numbers turn up, but one of them turns up twice, and which one depends on your sex: Kua 2 坤 for a man, Kua 8 艮 for a woman. Those two are exactly where the calculation sends a result of five, the one value with no seat on the compass, and the two birth years that share the doubled number stand three apart.
The four are not four separate lookups. They are one trigram with its lines changed. Your Kua answers to a trigram: three stacked lines, each of them either solid or broken. Leave every line as it is and you have 伏位, which is why 伏位 is always your own seat — that held for all eight Kua when we checked. Change the top line and you have 生氣. Change the bottom line and the middle line together and you have 天醫. Change all three and you have 延年. We ran that on all eight trigrams and it returned 32 of the 32 cells of the direction table this site publishes: every cell, with nothing left over and nothing forced.
It also explains something the direction table can only assert. Undo one of those changes with another and you land on a change that is already in the set of four, so those four recipes can reach exactly four trigrams from your own and never a fifth. Those four are your house — 1 坎 · 3 震 · 4 巽 · 9 離 on the East side, 2 坤 · 6 乾 · 7 兌 · 8 艮 on the West. The two halves of the compass do not mix because the arithmetic has no way across, not because a rule forbids the crossing.
And because changing a line twice puts it back, the jobs pair the eight numbers off two by two. Your 生氣 direction is the home seat of exactly one other Kua, and that Kua's 生氣 direction is your seat: the two of you point at each other. We put that question to all eight numbers for each job, and every one of them faced back: eight out of eight, on each of the three jobs that make couples at all.
| Which of the four | Lines changed in your own trigram | The couples it makes |
|---|---|---|
| 生氣 Sheng Qi | the top line | 1↔4 · 2↔8 · 3↔9 · 6↔7 |
| 天醫 Tian Yi | the bottom line and the middle line | 1↔3 · 2↔7 · 4↔9 · 6↔8 |
| 延年 Yan Nian | all three lines | 1↔9 · 2↔6 · 3↔4 · 7↔8 |
| 伏位 Fu Wei | no line at all | each Kua with its own seat |
This is why the form above wants a day and a month and not only a year. Neighbouring birth years almost never share an answer: of the 200 neighbouring pairs across 1900 to 2100, 199 give a different Kua, and the one exception is the pair straddling 2100 — the same roll-over that breaks the nine-year return, and a year nobody has been born in. So for every birth year this form can offer, the year before yours carries a different number from yours. The solar year turns at Lichun in early February, which puts a birth in January into that previous year. A date on the far side of Lichun therefore does not merely risk a different answer. It gives one, every time.
None of this replaces the table itself. All eight numbers with their four directions written out, the four formulas that reach them, and the same reference in thirteen languages live one page over: the lucky directions page.