Glossary v1 · 15 entries
Feng shui terms in plain English — each anchored to its Chinese original, its pinyin, and its traditional-character form, and each stating the exact convention our engine implements.
Engine version 0.1.0 · opened 2026-10-10 · new entries added as their sources are collated.
Two badges, two different scales — deliberately kept apart. Where an entry carries source-level badges, they come in two separate groups that must never be mixed:
- Source credibility — the five-level scale S/A/B/C/X applied to where a claim comes from: S first-hand classics, official standards, peer-reviewed work · A verifiable modern monographs · B practitioner literature, cross-reference only · C anonymous aggregation, clue-hunting only · X identified forgeries, blacklisted.
- Rule computability — the separate A/B/C scale applied to whether a rule can be computed: A fully computable and test-assertable · B needs expert judgement or external anchors · C not computable (aesthetic / faith statement), never enters the calculation path.
Time & calendar
| Term | Chinese | One-line definition |
|---|---|---|
| Year Pillar (Lichun boundary) | 年柱 · 立春 | The BaZi year pillar flips at the exact instant of Lichun (solar longitude 315°), not at the lunar new year — the two boundaries fall on different days in 195 of the 200 years from 1900 to 2100. |
| Chinese New Year (Zhengyue Chuyi) | 正月初一 | The first day of the first lunar month — the civil new year used by folk almanacs, which our engine keeps as a field strictly distinct from the Lichun-based BaZi year pillar. |
| Early / Late Zi Hour | 早晚子時 | Whether the day pillar changes at civil midnight or at 23:00 — a real school dispute that changes the day pillar for births between 23:00 and 01:00. |
| True Solar Time | 真太陽時 | Local mean solar time plus the equation of time — a correction of up to ±16 minutes that in western Chinese cities almost always changes the hour pillar. |
| Yun Period (Yuan Yun) | 元運 · 三元九運 | The 180-year cycle of nine 20-year flying-star periods; Period 9 began at Lichun 2024 and runs to 2043. |
Compass & directions
| Term | Chinese | One-line definition |
|---|---|---|
| Luopan | 羅盤 | The Chinese geomancer's magnetic compass, built as a stack of concentric rings — whose necessary ring set differs sharply between the San Yuan and San He lineages. |
| 24 Mountains | 二十四山 | The 24 directional names (8 stems, 12 branches, 4 corner trigrams), each spanning exactly 15° of the compass, that anchor every sitting and facing in feng shui. |
| Xia Gua / Ti Gua | 下卦／替卦 | The lower-trigram vs replacement-star split in Xuan Kong: a reading within ±4.5° of a mountain's centre yields a normal chart, the outer 3° on each side triggers a replacement chart. |
| Magnetic Declination | 磁偏角 | The physical angle between magnetic north and true north, which drifts with place and date — in 2026 Beijing it is about 7.5° west, the opposite sign from the historical eastward dip Shen Kuo recorded. |
| Sansha (Three Killings) | 三煞 | A year-spirit occupying the three branches opposite the year's three-harmony trio — an A-grade computable directional rule with a genuinely disputed application maxim. |
Xuan Kong & star systems
| Term | Chinese | One-line definition |
|---|---|---|
| Xuan Kong Flying Star | 玄空飛星 | The San Yuan time-and-direction system that flies nine stars through the nine palaces of the Luoshu grid for each period, sitting and facing. |
| Nine Stars | 九星 | The numbered stars 1 White Tanlang through 9 Purple Youbi, each with an element and a valence, that populate every flying-star chart. |
| 64 Hexagrams | 六十四卦 | The full Yijing hexagram set laid out as a compass ring for the Xuan Kong Da Gua school — 5.625° per hexagram in the common plate system. |
| San Yuan vs San He | 三元／三合 | The two great lineage families of compass feng shui — time-cycle flying stars versus three-harmony water method — which need different luopan rings and different rule sets. |
Engine & verifiability
| Term | Chinese | One-line definition |
|---|---|---|
| input_digest (recomputability) | 可复算 | The fingerprint our engine publishes with every chart — a JCS-canonicalised, SHA-256 hash of the normalised input — that lets anyone re-run the calculation and compare byte for byte. |
Editorial rules for this glossary
- Every definition is grounded in the project's collated rule tables and classical-source checks; nothing here is invented for this page.
- Where the tradition genuinely disagrees, the entry says so and links to the School Dispute Register rather than picking a winner silently.
- Terms are triple-anchored: Chinese original, pinyin, and traditional-character form, per the project's English-first publishing standard.
- Source-credibility (S/A/B/C/X) and rule-computability (A/B/C) badges are shown in separate, labelled groups.
See also
School Dispute Register · Accuracy report v1 · Errata · Methodology