Compass School.
The calculative half of Classical practice, covered in one page: your Kua number, the four favourable directions, and which one goes on the headboard.
You know the bed I mean. It went against that wall on moving day because the last people had left the dents in the carpet there, and it never occurred to anyone to ask whether the wall was right for you. Years pass. The bed stays. The desk chair stays. The whole household arranges itself around a set of decisions nobody actually made, and the closest anyone comes to a reason is "it has always been like that." Compass School is the half of the tradition that asks the question on purpose, for your particular household, instead of leaving it to whichever wall the carpet remembers.
Feng shui is really two disciplines working together. One reads the place. The other reads the fit between the place and the people who live in it. This cluster is the second half.
What Compass School reads
Form School asks one question. Compass School asks another. Form School reads the shape of what is around a building: the slope of the land, the way light enters, the path of the road, the room behind your chair. Compass School, Li Qi Pai, "school of patterns and qi", reads the numbers underneath it. The orientation. The directions. The match between a household and the eight slices of the horizon their home sits inside. The two halves were brought together into the shape practiced today during the Song and Ming periods, and they have been working in tandem ever since. Form School is its own discipline, distinct from Compass School, and it comes first.
Form first, then Compass
A site that fails Form cannot be saved by clever compass work. If the land is sour, no direction calculation rescues it. If the front door opens onto something the body refuses, no compass fix saves the room. If the bed sits under a beam that makes the room feel watched, the numbers cannot undo that. Form asks whether a place is livable. Compass asks how to tune it for this specific household. The traditional rule runs: without a compass reading, no Compass School technique applies. Flipped around, the rule holds just as true. A compass reading on an unlivable site is just numbers laid over a bad room.
The four branches, briefly
Classical Compass School has four sub-schools. Three of them, San He, San Yuan, and Xuan Kong (Flying Stars), read the building or the year. The fourth, Ba Zhai (Eight Mansions), reads the people inside the house. For a general reader, Ba Zhai is the one to learn first, because it is personal to the household, which is the layer the rest of this page walks through.
What a compass reading actually is
The luopan, the layered compass disc you have probably seen in photographs, is more reference than measuring device: a layered lookup table, not a precision instrument. For a home reader, a hiking compass or a phone app is enough, and the compass in your pocket is doing the same job, just shrunk onto a sheet of glass, that a ship's navigator once did with a brass bowl and a floating needle to cross an ocean. Classical practice reads direction to within 15 degrees. For everyday use, the eight directions are enough. A compass reading is a starting point, not a verdict.
Three orientations the tradition weights most
The rule under all of it is small and easy to miss. The system reads the direction your body faces rather than the orientation of the furniture. The headboard points where your head points when you lie down. The chair faces where your eyes face when you sit. The door faces where you face when you walk out of it. Furniture is just the frame. In order of leverage: bed, chair, door.
The free calculator returns your own four supportive directions in ten seconds, and if you want to know what each of those four is actually for, what your Kua number means walks through Sheng Qi, Tian Yi, Yan Nian, and Fu Wei by name. What follows here is where you point them.
The head of the bed
The bed is the highest-leverage placement, because the body spends the most still hours there: eight quiet hours, repeated. The tradition's default for ordinary seasons is Tian Yi, "Heavenly Doctor." When the body's task is rest rather than effort, the tradition points it that way. For a launch season, a new job, a push that needs momentum, the tradition points the headboard toward Sheng Qi, "generating qi." For couples, the tradition points the shared headboard toward Yan Nian, "long years", the direction it associates with bonds meant to last.
A practical aside. The bed rarely turns. Wardrobes, windows, plug sockets, the wall the room asks for. If the only available wall is one of your cautious four, the rough adjustment is the one the tradition weights most: any of your four supportive directions is better than any of the four cautious ones. Better than you had before is the point.
Where your chair faces
The chair is the second orientation, because work is the longest active task most people do at home. Sheng Qi for the working chair when you want momentum: the laptop chair, the call chair, the seat where you push something forward. Fu Wei, "sitting in stability", for deep, slow, solitary work: the study desk, the reading chair, the morning corner with the first cup. The doing seat and the thinking seat, different jobs, both worth doing.
A softer-priority case sits at the dinner table. Tian Yi for the head of the household's dining seat, the one that anchors the meal.
The chair turns. The bed rarely does. If you can only do one this week, make it the chair.
Where the front door opens
The door is the third orientation. The tradition reads the door's facing as what the home is angled toward. You cannot move a front door, but you can know what it is doing. If the door faces one of your four supportive directions, the tradition reads the home as broadly aligned with you. If it faces one of the cautious four, the tradition reads the home as workable and says the interior placements, the bed and the chair, carry more of the work. Perfect alignment is rare and not the point.
A move to try this week
Pick the chair. Turn it so your eyes face one of your four supportive directions when you sit. Sit for a week. Watch for something small and quiet, not a transformation. The tradition names the direction. The noticing is your job.
Nobody is going to inspect the room and check your work. That is the whole shape of Compass School once you strip the vocabulary away: a set of directions, offered, and a household deciding for itself whether the offered direction changes anything worth keeping. The bed can go back where it was. The chair can turn again next season. The compass reading is a starting point every time, never a verdict handed down once and left standing.
Where to go next
If you have not yet, find your Kua number so the rest of this page has something personal to attach to. For the East and West group split, the four favourable directions by name, and how a mixed-group household shares one home, what your Kua number means is the full read.