Kun's Facing Pair, And Where The Trigrams Sit In The Ring

Kun sits directly opposite mountain 5, Gen, twelve positions and a hundred and eighty degrees around the ring, itself one of the other three corner trigrams: the four ordinal trigram mountains pair off against each other in this way, Qian against Kun and Gen against Xun, the same Creative-Receptive and Mountain-Wind pairings the Yijing itself treats as complementary opposites. In compass school feng shui a sitting-facing pair built on a trigram mountain is read through the same basic method Stephen Skinner describes for the ring generally, back toward the sitting mountain and front toward its facing opposite, but a trigram mountain additionally carries its own hexagram, family member and Bagua attribute into readings that draw on the Yijing directly, a layer of meaning the branch and stem mountains, named for a zodiac animal or an elemental Day Master rather than for one of the eight trigrams, do not carry in the same way.

The four trigram mountains mark the diagonal points precisely because the ring's twelve branches already claim the twelve thirty-degree sector centres and its eight stems already claim the flanking positions around eight of those sectors, leaving the four ordinal gaps for the trigrams that complete the twenty-four. Compass school practice treats the fifteen-degree seam between one mountain and its neighbour as a real hazard, not a rounding error: a sitting or facing line falling exactly on that boundary, called an empty or straddling line, is read as drawing on the qi of both adjacent mountains at once rather than cleanly on one, and Stephen Skinner's account of the luopan treats avoiding a seam-line reading as one of the instrument's basic disciplines.