Feng Shui for White People

I didn't start magic doing magic, per se. I started with 风水. When I was still fairly young, my mother bought a couple of new agey books-- a handful of Sylvia Brownes, possibly a John Edwards (of "Crossing With" fame, not the political candidate) and a guide to Feng Shui, Chinese geomancy. I devoured them all, though the spiritism books weren't exactly how-to guides, so I never really attempted anything with them (later, when I discovered western magic, it was with the usual Llewellyn fluffy bunny warnings of "Spirits will fuck your shit up! They are always bad news." and so I never really explored it). The feng shui book, however, was chock full of useful information and all the relevant charts and calculations. (Now that I study East Asia professionally, I still wonder: What is it about charts and calculations that sinitic magical systems love so much? Not that the Renaissance western schools fare much better, mind)

So very early, I acquired a useful set of geomantic skills, devoid of any kind of cultural context. It was through feng shui that I learned to read energies, to channel and reflect and block the flow of qi wherever it needed to go. When I had problems in my life, I'd analyze the flow of energy through my spaces and make the appropriate corrections.

Feng shui was also my introduction to Eastern thought. Never before had I thought of the world as a constant state of flux, of energy as an innate quality that can be manipulated rather than originating in the practitioner. I didn't really sink in at the time, but when I returned to Eastern methods as a practitioner, I realized how much more woo I could push if I used myself as a conduit rather than a battery.

Zen speaks a lot about inner calm, about no-thingness (to borrow a term from Osho). It treats effort as transient, a mere reaction to the environment that should be as efficient and (in the Japanese tradition) elegant as possible. Vajrayana has a thousand thousand systems and techniques and devices for manipulating energy, for creating it and consuming it and using it to power things. Zen is not an esoteric tradition, at least in the sense of occulture. But I find the Zen approach works remarkably well for magic: use the inertia of things to power themselves. Don't lock a bunch of energy into a yantra if you don't need to; simply make the right push in the right place, and you can get everything to tumble just so. Qi is temporary, transient, a river of power that can be diverted but never stopped, never controlled.

I still use feng shui techniques occasionally, mostly when setting up new homes. Partially because feng shui lends a certain psychic balance to spaces, a sense of hyperspatial symmetry and, above all, flow that I enjoy that simply randomly arranging furniture can't provide. And partly because in using the tools, I can ground myself not only to physical space (a useful meditation in and of itself), but to the Dharma, as rigid but somehow flexible as feng shui itself.