having used Feng Shui as a stand-in (dang, can’t remember the academic term… must be getting old) for chinese asethetics for my master’s thesis, BOY, can I give you info. (Thesis topic: Geographic Code-Switching in Chinatown, Philadelphia, PA)
First, while it was used initially as a siting method for tombs, that was as AESTHETIC SITING ONLY. There was QUITE a snit in the court when the “common people” started using it as a method to improve their lives. It was designed to create appealing and beautiful and restful and appropriate landscapes. PERIOD.
Moving on a few centuries, people were using it heavily as a way to improve everything from health to future to numbers of offspring. Actually, it seems to work in some ways - that is, if you have a restful beautiful place to come home to, chances are your stress levels will lower, you’ll be more rested, you’ll make better decisions, you’ll fight less with your spouse… MANY of the principles are based on good PSYCHOLOGY. You don’t want wind blowing garbage in your front door. You don’t want your front door to stick or to swing open unexpectedly. You don’t want to have car lights coming straight at your house and in your bedroom window (hard to sleep). Etc. Etc.
Another portion is based on good land use. Don’t put your house on a flood plain, but you kinda want SOME source of clean water nearby. Don’t put a well in your courtyard (don’t want to have your kid fall in, you know?). Put a high mountain at your back (protect from polar easterlies), and put a lower mountain to your west than your east (oragraphic uplift will make your valley more well-watered than the valley to the east). Don’t live in a swamp. DUH.
Inside the home, don’t clutter, keep important spaces clear, and use color, texture, and form to keep your space balanced and appealing. Don’t put pointy furniture where you’ll bark your shins on it. Keep your pictures of family in one area, preferably a low traffic spot where you can have pleasant thoughts while being reminded of them. Put something sturdy near the door so you have a place to drop your things without having to catch them again immediately. make constricted spaces feel more open, divide up spaces that feel cavernous. Give your body and mind a place to rest as soon as you get in the door, and don’t show your dirty laundry to your house guests. Chi flow follows the same pattern your eyes and attention do inside a space - so if you have a HUGE window in your living room, your eyes turn there more often, and qi (in this case, your attention) goes out.
Overall, it is just plain good advice. Or it started that way. Add a few centuries and a LOT of chinese culture, and you start getting into magical cures. Flutes, red ribbons, lucky characters, etc. More psychology, but based on CULTURE. Add compass work (astrology), and some more esoteric forms school (shapes of places nearby having very restricted meaning), and things start to get complicated, and less effective for the non-asian. Schools start to diverge, and you get disagreements over use and application. the more it is used, the more it gets tangled with folklore and chinese philosophy.
Now, people who try to apply it to non-asians come up with a snag - if red ribbons don’t mean anything to me, do they help? Maybe, maybe not. I functionally beleive in qi, that is, it seems to be a good stand-in for whatever more subtle processes are going on, so if I use it as a proxy (AHA, that’s the word), I get good results. tehnically, I haven’t seen scientific evidence that it exists, so it may well be just in my mind. But I have no problem using the tool I have, since it has good results. When someone finds me the REAL tool, I’ll use that instead.
If you want some commonsense basis for most of the major FS rules, check out nancilee wyrda’s books. She’s very into energy stuff, but she also has the concrete underpinnings worked out pretty well, and cuts away a lot of the cultural stuff that is too hard to pick through anyway. makes it a lot more relevant, and brings out a lot of the “DUH” stuff, too (like of COURSE you don’t want your back to the door all the time, because you’ll get distracted more!).
I do practice FS (mostly on friends and family) and while I DO play with the compass stuff, I also find that it is mostly just a trigger for making me think about the spaces in new ways, and gets people to think about their lives carefully, too. A reasonable background in psych or human geography is a big help. But you’ll find that most cures are ‘duh’ common sense. Fine-tuning the cures takes someone who is sensitive to the small variations. I work with someone who does energy work - a highly non-scientific practice, but the results we’ve had working together seem pretty real. (could be fooling myself, but we also haven’t charged anyone for our work together…) perhaps what she senses as ‘energy’ is just a proxy for being highly tuned in to human reaction to place, or maybe not. I suspend my disbelief, and see if the outcome is effective. If it is, and so far I have yet to have a displeased customer, then I’ll go from there on faith. It kind of crosses over into my spiritual life at that point, where science is not relevant - so don’t ask me to explain why that part works. Prayer seems to work for some people, too, and I can’t say it isn’t REAL even if I can’t prove it. I certainly won’t suggest that it is science, though.
As for house value, beautiful houses that are nicely placed in the environment OUGHT to cost more. I’d like to know who is doing the assessment, though. (What school?)
Other resources: Lillian Too has a good rep, but I haven’t actually read her stuff. Nancilee Wyrda’s “book of Cures” is a good primer on the basics (non-asian form), her other books look good (came out after my thesis). Sarah Rossbach has a lot of good historical info, started as Black Hat school, and has been around a LONG time. Some stuff of hers was a little light, but she has a lot of new stuff out. Any book that says “aesthtics and practical” in the title is probably a good bet for the fundamental skinny, and I’d avoid anything that says it will make you happy or wealthy or well loved. Derek Walters is good for the compass and bagua content, as well as the forms school stuff - decent overall info - AND his tables aren’t messed up (something I’ve found frequently - the ‘real’ process is picky and annoying if you are doing loshu or bagua forms). Steven Skinner’s old book has been reprinted (The living earth manual of feng shui) - there’s a lot of secondary research in there, which is as close to primary source as you’re going to get, and this book is pre-‘craze’, too. I also pulled a few PhD dissertations from the university publishers, for about $35 bucks apiece, but that’s probably more than you need for this paper. You might find Pivot of the Four Quarters still floating around the university library, too. Also check out the periodicals index - there are a fair number of reasonable articles in a variety of fields, start pre-1995.
Good luck! Many people are selling something, and often it is drek. But those authors are at least reasonably reputable.
