What Compass School is, and why it sits next to Form School.

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 we use today during the Song and Ming periods. They have been working in tandem ever since. Form School is not Compass School. 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 if a place is liveable. 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 is just as true. A compass reading on an unliveable site is just numbers on a bad room. Form first. Then Compass.

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. The methodology page covers the bridge to Flying Stars when you want it.

What a compass reading actually is.

The luopan - the layered compass disc you have probably seen in photos - 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. (A printable personal compass overlay helps if you want one place to keep your numbers and your floor plan together.)

Classical practice reads direction to within 15 degrees. The methodology page walks through the 24 Mountains and the underlying grid. For everyday use, the eight directions are enough. A compass reading is a starting point, not a verdict.

Where to go next.

If you have ten seconds, find your Kua number. It tells you which four directions the tradition traditionally reads as supportive, and which it asks you to handle with care.

If you have an afternoon, read the East/West split and your four directions, then the three orientations the tradition weights most: the bed, the chair, the door.

If you want the deeper read, the methodology page walks through the formulas, the 24 Mountains, and the Later Heaven Bagua table.

Form first. Then Compass.