Zhen 震 is one solid line beneath two broken ones (☳): Thunder, the element Wood, and in the Shuo Gua the eldest son. On the 64-hexagram ring it opens the circle — the first eight segments clockwise from due north all have Zhen as their lower trigram.
Its two places on the compass
In the Later Heaven palaces Zhen holds the east: the mountains 甲 Jia, 卯 Mao and 乙 Yi, from 67.5° to 112.5°. In the Early Heaven arrangement it stands in the northeast with the number 8, so every hexagram it tops carries a 卦氣 of 8 — He Tu Wood (三八為朋). Its inverse is 巽, whose number is 2: together they sum to ten.
Its block of the ring, and the hexagrams it tops
Zhen’s block runs from 0° to 45°, ending at the northeast where Zhen stands in the Early Heaven order: 復, 頤, 屯, 益, 震 itself (22.5°–28.125°), 噬嗑, 隨 and 無妄, with the 卦運 8, 3, 4, 9, 1, 6, 7 and 2. The hexagrams Zhen tops — 震, 豐, 歸妹, 大壯, 恆, 解, 小過 and 豫 — each carry 卦氣 8. Note that 震 at 22.5° begins exactly on the line between the 坎 and 艮 palaces, one of the 大空亡 lines.
Reading it for a house
A house facing between 0° and 45° has a facing hexagram with Zhen below and a sitting hexagram with 巽 below, from the block opposite (180°–225°). A house sitting in the east palace (facing roughly west) reads its water from Zhen in the Dragon Gate formula — one of the two formations where no palace is left over, so the 輔卦 position doubles 地刑. The eldest son and the foot are Zhen’s Shuo Gua associations; KAXANTA’s 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