Kua 8 corresponds to Gen 艮, the Mountain trigram — stillness, the keeping-still, the youngest son of the trigram family — seated in the north-east of the Later Heaven arrangement. It belongs to the West Group of life numbers in Ba Zhai 八宅, the Eight Mansions school, and it is one of the two Kua numbers that classical convention enlarges: women whose birth-year calculation resolves to the centre number 5 are read as Kua 8. The table below gives the eight directions as they fall for Kua 8 — the four favourable stars, the four adverse ones — and the standard ways of applying them.
The four favourable directions of Kua 8
Kua 8's generating breath, Sheng Qi 生氣, falls in the south-west — the direction for undertakings that require sustained effort, and, fittingly for a mountain, the one the school points its natives toward when something large must be moved. Tian Yi 天醫, the heavenly doctor, falls in the north-west, the direction of recovery and dependable assistance. Yan Nian 延年, longevity, falls in the west, ruling the bonds that last. Fu Wei 伏位 rests in the north-east, Gen's own palace — and for this Kua the stable position carries particular weight, because stillness is not merely Gen's setting but its nature. All four favourable directions are the West Four set shared with every West Group number: south-west, north-west, west, and north-east.
The four unfavourable directions of Kua 8
The unfavourable four for Kua 8 are south, north, east, and south-east. Huo Hai 禍害, mishaps, falls in the south — the mildest, a direction of friction and small expense. Wu Gui 五鬼, the five ghosts, falls in the north, tied to suspicion, quarrel, and things lost within one's own walls. Liu Sha 六煞, the six killings, falls in the east — entanglement, dispute, compounding misjudgement. Jue Ming 絕命, the severed fate, falls in the south-east: Xun's wood driving into Gen's earth — the root that splits the hill, in the classical image. The school's concern, as always, is chronic orientation — the desk one occupies daily and the bed one returns to nightly, not an errand or a season.
Applying the table: bed, desk, and quiet rooms
A Kua 8 desk faces south-west when the work is heavy and consequential, north-east when it is reflective — study, planning, accounts. The bed is placed with the crown of the head toward the west for the household's bonds or the north-east for deep, restorative stillness; the south-east is the direction the manuals exclude outright. Doors facing any of the West Four are preferred where a choice exists. Gen's natives are the trigram family's natural contemplatives, and practitioners commonly advise them to keep one genuinely quiet room — reading chair, meditation seat, or simply the room where nothing is scheduled — inside a favourable sector, while bathrooms, storage, and the household's noise are pressed into the adverse ones.
The character of Kua 8
Gen is the mountain — keeping-still, the Shuo Gua's youngest son, the trigram of boundaries and rest. Kua 8 people are classically read as the steady points around which others arrange themselves: deliberate, trustworthy, slow to commit and slower to abandon, with a marked capacity for solitude. Earth is the element — accumulation, patience, ground that holds. The tradition's cautions are the mountain's own shadows: stubbornness, withdrawal, a standstill mistaken for stability. Its counsel keeps the proportions of the trigram — effort directed at the south-west's generating breath, bonds tended toward the west, and the north-east's own palace honoured as what it is, a summit for perspective rather than a wall against the world.
References
Canonical sources that inform this guide.
- Feng shui · WIKIPEDIA
- The Living Earth Manual of Feng Shui · BOOK
- Ba Zhai Ming Jing (八宅明鏡) · BOOK