The sitting and facing hexagrams are the foundation of any Xuan Kong Da Gua reading. Get them wrong and the entire audit is wrong. Yet beginners frequently confuse the two and use casual compass apps that don't account for magnetic declination — producing readings that are off by 10-15° and hexagrams that are 2-3 positions away from the actual one.
Sitting vs facing — definitions
Facing direction is where the building faces — usually but not always the direction of the front door. Sitting direction is the opposite, the back wall. For a freestanding house, this is unambiguous. For an apartment, it is the direction of the building's main entrance (not your apartment's door). Stand at the back wall, look outward, and the compass reading you take is the sitting direction. Stand at the front, look outward, and the reading is the facing direction. Most beginners use the front door reading as sitting — that is the wrong end of the building.
Compass reading methodology
Use a Lou Pan if available. If using a Western compass: stand 1m from the wall (avoid metal interference), hold the compass level, take three readings 30 seconds apart, and average them. Apply the local magnetic declination correction — in 2026 this is approximately +6° to +14° depending on location (look up your specific lat/lon at NOAA's online calculator). The result is your true compass bearing in degrees from true north.
Translating bearing to hexagram
The 64 hexagrams are arranged in a fixed sequence around the compass. Each occupies 5.625° (360 / 64). The mountain ring of the Lou Pan shows the hexagram for any given degree. For Western tools, a hexagram chart maps degree ranges to hexagrams: 352.5°–358.125° = Hexagram 1 (Qian), 358.125°–3.75° = Hexagram 2, and so on clockwise. The key boundary cases are the meeting points where two adjacent hexagrams switch — readings within 1° of a boundary should be re-taken or treated cautiously.