Introduction: Graves and Army Camps

Since ancient times, feng shui has been used to bury ancestors so that their descendants prosper, and in war to pitch camp. A camp has a set layout and set warnings, but a fixed layout must be adapted to the terrain and never copied as it stands.

Burial and war

Feng shui serves not only burial at a grave site but also war. Military writings on terrain discuss it at length: to err on terrain is a cardinal error in war, and life and death turn on a single thought.

天发杀机，龙蛇起陆，人发杀机，天地反覆。

Our translation: When heaven sets loose its killing force, dragons and snakes rise onto the land; when man sets loose his killing force, heaven and earth are overturned.

Jiang Ziya said that a camp laid out on the pattern of heaven cannot be harmed by anything outside it.

Rules for pitching camp

When his officers marched to war and pitched camp, Jiang Ziya required them to array the troops in battle formation. A few rules of the camp could not be broken:

• The commander’s seat is on the east side of the camp, the Green Dragon side. Once his seat is set, the camp’s main gate opens only ten days later.
• The camp sits with its back to the point the handle of the Big Dipper points to, and faces the enemy’s position.
• Never drink stagnant water; never camp on ground with no way to retreat behind it.

No camp is pitched on these four kinds of ground:

• Ground that is low on all four sides and high in the middle.
• Ground that is high all around and low in the middle.
• The mouth of a valley; troops do not rest there.
• The place where a mountain comes down into flat land; in feng shui it is the head of the lair.

The ten posts of the camp

Records say the camp is laid out by the twelve earthly branches into ten posts, each set by a branch and given its own duty, from the commander’s post to the armory:

But if the posts never changed, the enemy would know them by heart and see through every move, and the battle could not be won. So every post is placed to suit the terrain and its features, so that the army is as still as Mount Tai at rest and as quick as a fleeing hare on the move. Only then does it win.

The five divisions

The sixth chapter of Sun Tzu’s teaching on war also sets out the method for a great battle. The army stands in five divisions: the left division on the Green Dragon side, the right division on the White Tiger side, the front division in front, the rear division behind and the center division in the middle. Around the commander, swords stand on the left, long halberds on the right, shields and armor in front, bows and crossbows behind, and banners and drums in the middle. Soldiers advance at the drum and withdraw when the gong sounds; the army moves at the command of the gongs and drums. This is closely bound up with the Chinese study of feng shui.

Adapting

Today the world is crowded, and the dead compete with the living for land. A single plot is already hard to find; to find a true lair in which to bury one’s ancestors is as hard as climbing to heaven.

So the study of feng shui demands adaptation: it does not cling to set methods or follow the ancients blindly. Feng shui layouts are applied flexibly, never fixed. As in the images of the Book of Changes, each image appears only once, and the same layout never appears a second time. Only a deep, intuitive grasp of this makes adaptation possible.

Source: The Way of the Earth's Veins (天纪：地脉道)