My Feng Shui Home

← Back to Schools of feng shui

The four feng shui schools, in one map.

5 minutes - last updated

Feng shui is not one method. It is a family of methods. And not four rival schools fighting for the same job either. They answer different questions, in different vocabularies, with different tools. The most useful thing a beginner can do is hold a clean map of who answers what. Then the rest of this guide stops sounding like a single muddled tradition. Here is that map.

The four schools, named once

Four lineages do most of the work in mainstream practice. Form School (Luan Tou Pai, "mountain head school") reads the shape of the landscape and the built environment around a home. Compass School (Li Qi Pai, "school of patterns and qi") reads the directional and numerical structure of a space using a compass bearing. Flying Stars (Xuan Kong Fei Xing) is the time-aware sub-school of Compass School. It layers a calendar on top of the directional reading. BTB (Black Sect Tantric Buddhist feng shui) is the 20th-century Western adaptation. It anchors the nine life-area sectors to the front door, not to a compass bearing. That is the full roster. From here on, English names only.

Classical lineages and one Western adaptation

Form, Compass, and Flying Stars are Classical Chinese lineages with centuries of textual tradition behind them. Form is the oldest, seeded in the Tang dynasty. Compass consolidated later, through the Song and Ming. BTB is the recent one. Grandmaster Lin Yun formalised it in the 1980s and brought it West. Treat both sides even-handedly. Both are real practices. They answer different questions in different vocabularies, and being recent does not make BTB less of a school. This guide leans Classical, and covers BTB on its own terms when it lands.

The map, by question

The cleanest way to hold these four is to attach each one to the question it actually answers.

  • What is around this place, and is it liveable? Form School. The shape of the land, the embrace of the surrounding buildings, the line a road takes toward your door.
  • How is this place oriented, and how does that fit this specific household? Compass School. It works direction by direction. The personal layer (the Kua number and the Eight Mansions or Ba Zhai sub-school) attaches to each member of the household.
  • How does this place change with the calendar? Flying Stars. Which corner of the home is the calm one this year, which is the cautious one, and when that shifts.
  • How does the floor plan relate to the entry experience, with intention layered on? BTB. The Bagua's nine life areas anchored to the front door, activated by the Three Secrets ritual.

That is the map. Four questions, four schools, one each.

How they fit together

They share vocabulary. Qi, yin and yang, the five elements, the Bagua. They differ in what they measure. Form measures shape. Compass measures bearing. Flying Stars measures time on top of bearing. BTB reads the floor plan relative to the door, with intention as the active ingredient. They are not contradictory. The honest rule is one method per question, stay consistent within it. The common beginner error is mixing a BTB door-aligned Bagua with Classical Kua directions in the same reading. Pick a method, then stay inside it.

Where this guide goes next

The next page sharpens the foundational divide between Form School and Compass School, the two halves of Classical practice. The page after that picks up Flying Stars and BTB together, because both sit outside the Form-and-Compass core for different reasons. If you want the prior layer first, the foundations page on what feng shui actually is sets the ground. If you want the four Compass sub-schools by name, what Compass School is carries the roster.

Where to go next