八宅 · Eight Mansions
Your Kua number and eight directions
Eight Mansions splits the compass into four directions that suit you and four that do not, and it decides which from two things: the year you were born and your sex. You get all eight named, ranked, and with what the tradition actually puts in each one, because “your good directions are southeast, east, south and north” does not tell you where to put a bed.
The formula is genuinely different for men and women, and there is no third version of it, so this is the one calculator here that cannot work without that field. The time only matters if you were born within a day of Li Chun in early February.
Why your number may differ from another site
The Kua year turns at Li Chun (立春), the start of spring in the solar calendar, which falls in the first week of February. Born before it and you belong to the previous year, a different Kua, and a different four directions. A calculator that uses the calendar year is wrong for everyone born in January and the first days of February, which is about one person in nine.
There is a second, quieter version of the same mistake, and this site was making it until today: assuming Li Chun is always 4 February. It is not. It fell on the 3rd in 2021-02-03, and it lands on the 5th in thirty-eight of the years between 1900 and 2030. It also has a time of day: in 2024 it arrived at 16:27 CST, so a birth that morning belonged to the old year and a birth that evening did not. This now reads the real instant, and if you were born on the day itself it asks for your time rather than picking for you.
- Year boundary
- Li Chun (立春), read in China Standard Time, the same boundary the BaZi year pillar turns on. Not 1 January and not the lunar new year, which can be up to three weeks later
- Kua 5
- A Kua of 5 has no palace of its own, since the centre of the Lo Shu square has no direction. Men take 2 and women take 8, the most widely taught convention
- Sex
- The formula is different for men and women and there is no third form. Where a reader's sex is not recorded, the Kua is not computed rather than guessed
- Does it work
- No study has tested whether sleeping with your head to one compass point rather than another affects anything. It is a tradition, it is cheap to follow, and that is the whole case for it
The eight names are not a list, they are a derivation
Your Kua number is a trigram: three stacked lines, each one solid or broken. The eight directions come from flipping those lines. Flip the top line and you get Sheng Qi. Flip the bottom two and you get Tian Yi. Flip all three and you get Yan Nian, the trigram that is your exact opposite in every line, which the tradition reads as complement rather than conflict. Flip only the middle and you get Jue Ming, the worst of the eight.
Three lines give exactly eight ways to flip them, including flipping none, which is Fu Wei, your own trigram sitting in its own place. Eight subsets, eight directions, nothing left over and nothing counted twice. That is worth knowing because it means the tables you find online are checkable rather than something to be taken on trust, and when we checked ours we found two of the eight Kua numbers had their two worst directions the wrong way round.
| Name | Lines to flip | Read as |
|---|---|---|
| 生氣 Sheng Qi | Top | Energy and beginnings. The best of the four. |
| 天醫 Tian Yi | Bottom and middle | Health and recovery. |
| 延年 Yan Nian | All three | Relationships and longevity. |
| 伏位 Fu Wei | None | Stability. Your own trigram, in its own place. |
| 禍害 Huo Hai | Bottom | Small mishaps. The mildest of the bad four. |
| 五鬼 Wu Gui | Middle and top | Arguments, theft, things going missing. |
| 六煞 Liu Sha | Bottom and top | Conflict that drags on. |
| 絕命 Jue Ming | Middle | Total loss. The worst of the eight. |
What Eight Mansions does not do is read the building. It reads you against the building, which is why it needs your birth details and nothing about the property. The school that reads the property itself is Flying Star, and it wants a construction year and a compass bearing instead.