Yin zhai (陰宅) is the Feng Shui of burial sites, as yang zhai (陽宅) is that of dwellings. The Xuan Kong Da Gua ring is a compass method, so it reads a grave the way it reads a house: from the bearing the grave faces. The facing hexagram is the ring segment in front of the headstone, the sitting hexagram the one behind the mound, and the pair’s 卦運 is read against the period.
The same ring, a different subject
Nothing in the ring changes for a grave. The 64 hexagrams sit in the Fu Xi order, 5.625° each; the facing of the grave — the direction the headstone looks — lies in one segment, and the segment 180° away is its sitting hexagram, always the facing hexagram with every line inverted. The two share one 卦運 and their 卦氣 sum to ten. What differs is only the subject: a grave has no front door, so the facing is taken from the headstone or the direction the mound opens toward.
San He and San Yuan
Two families of Feng Shui methods meet at a grave. San He (三合) methods read landform and water around the site. San Yuan (三元) methods, of which Xuan Kong Da Gua is one, read the compass bearing and the calendar period. They answer different questions, and a site can be assessed by both; the ring reading adds precision to the orientation, not a judgement of the landscape.
Period and boundary lines
The period verdict is the same as for a house: in Period 9 (Li Chun 2024 to Li Chun 2044), which belongs to 下元, a pair with 卦運 6–9 is timely and one with 卦運 1–4 is not, until the half of the cycle turns in 2044. The San Yuan sources are strictest about lines: an orientation on the line between two trigram palaces is 大空亡, and one between two mountains of a palace 小空亡, and both are avoided. At 0.9375° a line (爻), a grave’s bearing is worth setting by instrument, not by eye.
References
Canonical sources that inform this guide.
- Feng Shui/Xuan Kong Da Gua/Compass Location · WEBSITE
- Feng Shui/Xuan Kong Da Gua/Binary Representation of the 64 Hexagrams · WEBSITE
- Bagua (Eight Trigrams) · WIKIPEDIA
- I Ching · WIKIPEDIA