Kan 坎 is one solid line held between two broken ones (☵): Water, the element Water, and in the Shuo Gua the middle son. Its Later Heaven palace is the north — the palace behind the classic house that sits north and faces south — but on the 64-hexagram ring it stands in the west, where the Early Heaven arrangement puts it.
Its two places on the compass
In the Later Heaven palaces Kan holds the north: the mountains 壬 Ren, 子 Zi and 癸 Gui, from 337.5° to 22.5°, straddling due north. In the Early Heaven arrangement it stands in the west with the number 7, so every hexagram it tops carries a 卦氣 of 7 — He Tu Fire (二七同道). Its inverse is 離, whose 3 makes the ten.
Its block of the ring, and the hexagrams it tops
Kan’s block runs from 225° to 270°, ending at due west: 訟, 困, 未濟, 解, 渙, 坎 itself (253.125°–258.75°), 蒙 and 師, carrying the 卦運 3, 8, 9, 4, 6, 1, 2 and 7. The hexagrams Kan tops — 屯, 既濟, 節, 需, 井, 坎, 蹇 and 比 — each carry 卦氣 7.
Reading it for a house
A house facing between 225° and 270° has a facing hexagram with Kan below and a sitting hexagram from 離’s block behind it. A house sitting in the north palace — facing roughly south, the 坐北朝南 orientation — reads its water from Kan in the Dragon Gate formula: water arriving from the west (先天) and southwest (後天), leaving toward the southeast (天劫) or the front. The middle son and the ear are Kan’s Shuo Gua associations; the ring reading does not weigh them.
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