Feng Shui: The Chinese View of the Environment

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Features: Earlier, the term "feng shui" was closely associated with words like "superstition" and "divination." However, from today's perspective, feng shui is a unique cultural landscape of Chinese culture. Over thousands of years of civilized history, feng shui has been the symbol of the Chinese people's pursuit of an ideal environment. The concepts of qi theory, yin, the five elements, the Bagua, and the idea of "harmony between heaven and humanity" in traditional Chinese philosophy have become the cultural soil from which feng shui emerged. Feng shui is a unique cultural landscape of Chinese culture. The concepts of qi theory, yin, the five elements, the Bagua, and the idea of "harmony between heaven and humanity" in traditional Chinese philosophy have become the cultural soil from which feng shui emerged. Feng shui emphasizes the harmony between humans and nature, and its essence is the pursuit of an ideal living and development environment. The concept of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness in feng shui actually reflects an environmental view of ancient Chinese people. Chinese feng shui has not only influenced ancient cities, villages, residential areas, and burial grounds but also has deep roots in traditional Buddhism, Taoism, Confucian ethics, landscape architecture, and landscape poetry and painting. Indeed, feng shui is mixed with a lot of superstition, but the theme of pursuing an ideal living environment is eternal. It is precisely for this reason that contemporary Western society is so concerned with Chinese feng shui. This is a work that comprehensively and systematically explores the formation, theoretical core, social manifestations, and cultural orientation of feng shui from a cultural perspective, taking the relationship between humans and nature as a starting point. This book is of reference value for research in fields such as cultural studies, history, geography, architecture, folklore, anthropology, and sociology. Excerpt: Chapter "The Earth as Mother": The Philosophical Premise of Feng Shui Since the dawn of humanity, we have been inseparably linked with Mother Earth. Our food, clothing, shelter, and transportation all rely on the earth. Regardless of the past, present, or future, the earth will always be the spatial environment in which humanity survives. A large number of Neolithic settlement sites discovered from 6000 to 2000 BCE indicate that settlements chosen on the back slopes with water sources, or at the edges of rivers and swamps, were most common① Whether during the Yangshao period or the Longshan period, this was the case. The reason is simple: settlements near water sources made production and daily life convenient; settlements built at the confluence of rivers facilitated communication; and the valleys where settlements were located became channels for communication between different settlements. Especially since most of these settlements are now overlaid by modern cities, it shows that their site selection still retains its rationality today. It appears that humans began to actively choose their living environments thousands of years ago. Accumulated experience over time, when it reaches a certain stage, can potentially evolve into a discipline. However, for experience to rise to the level of a discipline, it needs to be guided by a methodology. The vibrant academic thoughts and outstanding philosophical theories that emerged during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods provided the possibility for such a need. Thus, starting from the Warring States period, a discipline about "environmental selection" guided by classical philosophy—feng shui—began to take shape. The concepts of yin and yang, as well as the related theories of qi and the organic theory of the earth, had a profound impact on the formation and development of feng shui in the years to come; while the idea of "the earth as mother" served as the direct basis for the formation of feng shui. Without understanding the philosophical origins of ancient Chinese feng shui thought, it is impossible to fully grasp the essence of ancient Chinese feng shui. I. The Origin of the "Yin-Yang" Concept and Its Influence on Feng Shui Without the guidance of the yin-yang theory, ancient Chinese feng shui thought and culture would not have emerged. The yin-yang concept can be traced back to the I Ching. The era in which the I Ching was compiled has long been debated. However, based on the many stories about the Shang and early Zhou periods cited in its hexagram and line texts, it may have been a work from the early Western Zhou period①. The I Ching itself does not mention the words "yin" or "yang," but it attempts to summarize various phenomena in nature and human society using two opposing principles ("—" and "—") and their arrangements and combinations.