A Book Review by Kartar Diamond
The Feng Shui Kit: The Chinese Way to Health, Wealth and Happiness at Home and at Work was actually co-written by Man-Ho Kwok and Joanne O’Brien, published in 1996. This book is still available on Amazon from Used Book Sellers and it should also come with a plastic replica of a Feng Shui compass.
The plastic “luo pan” may or may not come with any used copies and I know for myself that the plastic compass which came with my copy from 25 years ago is nowhere to be found. I don’t need it since I have several classical luo pan and a Cammenga Military Compass.
Man-Ho Kwok opens with a seamless description of what Feng Shui is, with some historical references, such as quoting a sage named Mencius from the 4th century B.C. The author describes feng shui as “at one extreme, it is a way of interpreting the hidden and mysterious forces of the cosmos, and at the other, it is a practical approach to environmental planning.”
Even the ancient Chinese were aware of the need for conservation and how imperative it has always been to take care of our natural environment and not decimate the forests and streams for selfish or short-sighted gains.
The author notes that the role of a feng shui master, historically male, would be right along side an architect or city planner, whether the project was a major commercial block or a single-family residence. Man-Ho Kwok states that much of the ancient feng shui literature has been lost, but some great works have survived such as “The Burial Classics” and “The Yellow Emperor’s Dwelling Classic,” dating back to the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.
Like other authors I have reviewed, he mentions that the imagery of the dragon represents many aspects of Qi (life force energy), associated with land forms, the heavens, and sky, mountains, the seas and even personified by the emperors of China. He sites the dragon as a sign of strength as well as male fertility, with fertility rituals exalting the dragon still in practice today.
The analogies of the dragon continue with a section on Ch’i, which is now more universally written as “Qi.” While describing Heavenly Qi (which includes climate and the changing weather and seasons), he introduces the 24 Solar Terms. These 24 Solar Terms divide the 12 months into two parts lasting about 15 days each. Understanding these natural cycles is integral to understanding the Taoist concept of Creator, our purpose, and what the actual practical application of living in harmony with our environment really means. We are part of the environment from a Taoist perspective and not meant to conquer or pervert it. This is a world view more prevalent now than ever before.
Feng Shui does rely on the Solar Calendar, and yet in the next chapter he presents a Lunar calendar for readers to locate their personal Chinese zodiac sign. This is a very common discrepancy made among many authors and practitioners who bounce back and forth between different schools of Feng Shui and hybrid versions which incorporate both classical Feng Shui with more than one type of Chinese astrology.
Man-Ho Kwok speculates on the origin of the Eight Trigrams, with the fabled story repeated by many about a tortoise emerging from the River Lo with the cosmic markings of binary code on its shell. Referring to it as a legend, he ties in a practice of divination used long ago where the shell of a tortoise was used for oracle readings. When the shell was heated, it would crack into various lines and the shaman would read those lines (like tea leaves), but presumably the broken or solid lines would be interpreted similarly to the yin and yang lines from the I-Ching.
The author refers to the “Pa Kua” as he introduces what is now called the Ba Zhai or Eight Mansion method, where the reader can determine their own personal “gua” or trigram and find out if they are in the East Group or West Group. At the most basic level, these groups identify what your personal preferred directions are for sleeping, entrances, or work positions. The compass provided in his kit also highlights these East and West group directional preferences.
Authors and practitioners choose to include this information in a Beginner’s Book for a variety of reasons. For some, this is the extent of their Feng Shui knowledge. For others, it is just an easy method to get the student acclimated to Feng Shui principles, the concept of directions and it gives them a chance to stylize their home or workspace from the personal angle (based on birth year). More advanced techniques may or may not be revealed with further reading or instruction by these same teachers.
Even I covered some of the Eight Mansion School in my second book, The Feng Shui Matrix (2006). However, one big change I have made since has been reverting back to the original way, where each person has a designated trigram based on their year of birth, but regardless of gender. Man-Ho Kwok uses instead the conventional and still popular protocol to distinguish between males and females born in the same year.
Next the author shares two ways to use the luopan which are not discussed in most pop culture feng shui books from that time. He instructs the reader to align two of the rings on his compass which depict the “trigram” of the location and the reader’s personal trigram. For example, one could align the door location of the house with the person. Let’s say the door is in the West (Dui trigram) and the person living there is the Li trigram. The Dui and Li trigrams together form a hexagram and he has brief passages for each of the 64 possible combinations. At this point, the reader will see that some of these pairings are in conflict for the elements they represent. For example, a Kan (water person) in the Kun-Southwest sector is a clash of earth dominating water. Simon Brown’s book also covers this, where a physical location is remedied with an Element that is productive to the person or place. In this example, the metal element supports the water (Kan) person.
The other way to use the compass is to align your personal Chinese zodiac sign with the Chinese zodiac sign symbolic of a certain direction. For instance, a portion of the West sector includes the Rooster direction. Let’s say the person’s bed is located in the Rooster direction (you must be working with an accurate floor plan to confirm all directions). Then the direction can be paired with the person’s sign, such as Ox. One could then refer to the brief oracle-like passage which pairs the Ox and Rooster. Kwok says you can do a compass reading either inside or outside, but fortunately he also cautions readers to not stand too close to anything metallic, as that can throw a compass off.
His compass instructions are a way to surmise what kind of influence a direction has on the person. The difference with the Zodiac sign technique compared to the one pairing trigrams is that there is no elemental remedy for a clash between two Chinese Zodiac signs. And if it is not clear already, the Chinese zodiac signs represent both directions as well as time, such as someone being born in the Year of the Snake, while sleeping with their head pointing to the Tiger direction.
These are stand-alone techniques for certain rings of the feng shui compass, but the author never mentions the Flying Star School of Feng Shui. This is the classical form of Feng Shui most commonly associated with use of a compass in current times.
Kwok briefly describes the “Pa Kua” mirror, also known as the Ba’gua mirror and its purported power to correct or deflect “sha Qi” alignments, such as having the octagonal mirror posted to face something objectionable in order to push its energy away. He also introduces the “feng shui ruler,” and the compass which comes with his kit has measurements along the perimeter to show which lengths are good or bad.
Without needing the compass, one could also measure a piece of furniture to determine the impact on its user. The problem with this information, especially in a beginners feng shui book, is that it’s an over-emphasis on a detail, when the more important principles are not yet shared with the reader. This might be on par with a feng shui book focused on the type of flowers in your garden while ignoring the massively more important interiors of the house.
His chapter Feng Shui At Home is fairly good and straight forward, minus a few isolated enduring myths included (like the unwarranted fears for how modern kitchen appliances are arranged in relation to each other).
Any author who dispenses general advice with a disclaimer that their observations or recommendations don’t apply 100% of the time could easily escape my criticism. However, much of the book, particularly in the chapters for home and workspace, dole out advice which could be not just useless, but even potentially harmful. He writes about how a pool should not be too close to a house and kept clean, which is all well and good. But he states that a pond is a sign of good fortune and should be positioned in front of an entrance. This is just one example where that might be helpful 50% of the time and in other instances it could be undermining for the occupants. As well, ideal locations for water change over long periods of time. When his book was published in 1996, one of the best locations for outside water was to the east. Now in Period 9 (2004-2023), the best location is aligned to the north sector of a property.
Likewise, more than once he recommends wind chimes outside a home to deflect away evil or “yin” spirits. In fact, a poorly placed wind chime could actually attract a ghost.
In more than one place in the book, Kwok recommends certain colors and almost implies that every home needs a representation of red (fire), green (wood), yellow (earth), black (water) and white (metal) color. There are several aspects to the color advice which are upsetting for me to read. Firstly, colors as representations of elements are a weak substitute for the real element and we don’t arbitrarily use all the elements to create balance. Next, his recommendations for which colors to use are based more on the occupant’s birth data than on the space itself. (What a nightmare to choose a color scheme for a home with more than one person living there).
In only one spot in the book he appears to take cues from the Black Hat School specifically, by noting that a “wealth point” is in the upper left-hand corner away from a room’s door. If one is going to follow the generic advice of the Black Hat School, he should have double checked his illustration which erroneously places the “wealth point” in the lower left-hand corner of the room. This would be what the Black Hatters call the “Knowledge” area.
In one of the most absurd passages, he notes that a house which is lower in stature to the structures in front or in back of it, should commence with the feng shui equivalent of elevator shoes. His solution is that you can raise the height of the roof by erecting signs on the roof or by placing “wooden, metal, or stone shapes that symbolize swords on the roof; these act like knives cutting into the bad fortune that descends from taller buildings.” Well, perhaps no one will bother a person whose roof is decorated as such, since only a crazy person would live there.
The final chapter on Rural Feng Shui is eloquently written and it reminds me of other books which also describe feng shui in ways the reader can appreciate the awesome power of our natural world, such as with mountains and rivers, even as the source of life and food. But the influences of these natural features, which concur with common sense, are then juxtaposed with ideas and practices which can seem far-fetched and superstitious for the uninitiated. I’m not sure how any author or practitioner can reconcile the contradictions in the scope of just one book.
Kwok and O’Brien include a Bibliography of more than a dozen books, which also lists three others authored by them, as well as some historically important works, like Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China. He also includes Evelyn Lip’s book Chinese Geomancy, which immediately answered my question as to why the material in his book seemed so familiar. I had just reviewed several of Lip’s books a few month’s before and it appears he borrowed many examples from her books or used her same sources. In my earnest desire to help readers not bother reading misleading or redundant information, this book would be an example of that.
Author: Kartar Diamond
Company: Feng Shui Solutions ®
From the Feng Shui Book Review Series
