64.The Eight Trigrams and the Five Elements

With chalk and a blackboard that prices for fruit had been written on before she erased them, Wisteria began to explain to us the rudiments of Feng Shui. I took also rudimentary notes of the lesson with paper and coloured pens and now publish them for you. 

"There are eight directions in which one can move away from the center," said Wisteria.

 So far so good. These directions were the same as for Westerners. 

Wisteria said there was a trigram for each of these directions.

A trigram is any of eight possible combinations of three whole or broken lines used in Chinese divination. 

The chart below shows all eight combinations or trigrams, one for each direction you

can move away from the center.

As you can see in the chart, each trigram has a name. For example, the trigram that corresponds to the North is called Kan, which means Water. And so on.

                                       

Each and every person is linked to one of these trigrams.

For things to go well for you, it is necessary for the door to your house to be in the direction that corresponds to your trigram. If it isn’t, you will never be as happy with your life as you could be.

Of course, we all wanted to know which was our trigram. But it was Michael Wisteria Tai tai was working for. So we watched attentively as she looked for his.

Finding one's trigram is supposed to be an easy but somewhat sexist operation. It is done one way for men and another for women. Both men and women have to add certain numbers from a chart to the year of their birth. But men also have to substract six from the result. The numbers that make up the result obtained are added among themselves to reduce them to just one digit. And that number is the number of the querent´s trigram. And that trigram tells the querent where the door to his or her house should be to avoid misfortune. 

Of course, one has to keep in mind that the Chinese year does not begin at the same time as the European Fairy Year, which begins on the first of November, or the European Human Year which begins on the first of January. The Chinese years begins later, which means that one's year of birth could vary if one was born after the first of November or after the first of January. 

"So a door in the wrong direction explains why there are so many unhappy people," scoffed Fergus. 

After finding Michael's trigram, Wisteria began to tell us about the five Chinese elements. Europeans have four elements, fire, water, air and earth. But the Chinese elements are five: metal, water, wood, fire and earth. 

The five elements have a GENERATING CYCLE. Metal contains water, water nurtures wood, wood feeds fire, fire produces earth and earth is where metal can be found. 

But the five elements also have a CYCLE OF DESTRUCTION. Metal is hostile to wood, wood is hostile to earth, earth is hostile to water, water is hostile to fire and fire is hostile to metal. 

For a place to be propitious, all these elements have to be present in the same quantity.

If there is an excess of one element or a lack of another there will be no good luck. Disaster is bound to happen. For example, too much water puts out fire, and that means there will be no earth to produce metal, etc.  

I could see there was some sense in this, and I agree that balance is important, but the relationship between some of the elements seemed a little strange.

“I’m sure I contain more liquid than most metal does,” protested Fergus.

“Liquid yes, but not necessarily water,” counterattacked Branna, who was a true believer in the wisdom of the East.

Everyone, including Grandpa Rabbit, laughed. Except for Wisteria Tai tai, who frowned at these interuptions to her class and soon resumed explaining.