Kua numbers & lucky directions

The idea behind it

Eight Mansions is one of the oldest compass-school systems. Its premise: the eight trigrams of the bagua describe types of qi, and every person resonates with one trigram — the life gua (命卦) — determined by birth year. Because each trigram sits at a fixed compass point in the Later Heaven arrangement, your trigram implies a personal geometry: four directions whose qi supports you, four whose qi works against you.

The same logic applies to buildings: a house's sitting direction gives it a house gua, and the classical method matches East-group people to East-group houses. Popular modern use has largely reduced the system to the personal kua — simpler, but only half of the original method.

The eight energies

For any kua number, the eight compass directions carry these eight traditional energies — four favorable, four unfavorable, in descending order of strength:

Tradition applies them by facing: sleep with your headboard toward, work facing, and (in stricter practice) angle the stove toward your good directions — Shēng Qì for career momentum, Tiān Yī for health, Yán Nián for relationships, Fú Wèi for stability. The commanding position rule still comes first: a bed in your best direction but in line with the door is considered worse than a well-placed bed in a neutral direction.

How the number is derived

Reduce the digits of your birth year to a single digit, subtract from 11 for males or add 4 for females, reduce again, and replace a result of 5 (which has no trigram) with 2 for males or 8 for females. One subtlety trips up every generic calculator: the feng shui year begins at Li Chun (立春, ~February 4), not January 1 — and one major lineage uses Chinese New Year instead. The calculator page documents the formula, the boundary rules, and the school differences in full, with the complete direction chart for all eight kua numbers.

An honest note

There is no scientific evidence that compass directions personalized by birth year affect health, wealth, or luck. The kua system is a coherent, centuries-old symbolic framework — we document it accurately, and our calculator is exact to the tradition — but orienting your desk toward Shēng Qì is a cultural practice, not a treatment. If it helps, the plausible mechanisms are mundane: intentionality, tidier arrangement, and a workspace you finally thought carefully about.