Wind & Water is an independent guide to classical feng shui. It is not Feng Shui Architects Pty Ltd, the Sydney architecture practice that used this domain until the mid-2010s, and it has no connection to that firm, its principals or its teaching programmes.

The five classical schools of feng shui

Feng shui is not one system. It is a family of schools that share a vocabulary and quarrel about method.

A beginner meeting feng shui for the first time usually meets it as if it were one body of rules. It is not. The classical tradition splits into schools, each with its own speciality, and they sometimes flatly contradict one another — the same house can be read as fortunate by one school and troubled by another.

The Form school (Luan Tou)

The oldest layer. It reads the visible landscape: the shape of hills, the path of water, the approach to the site. The four guardian forms — turtle at the back, dragon and tiger at the sides, bird in front — come from here. Everything else in feng shui sits on top of Form school observation, and most practitioners agree that when Form and compass readings disagree, the landscape wins.

The Compass schools

The rest of the family reads direction and time rather than shape.

Eight Houses (Ba Zhai) divides houses and people into east and west groups by trigram, and matches person to dwelling. It is the simplest system and the one most often taught first.
Flying Stars (Fei Xing) adds time. Nine “stars” move through a nine-square grid on a twenty-year cycle, so a house's reading changes with the calendar. This is the school most modern consultants practice.
San Yuan, the “Triple Primaries” school, is the wider family Flying Stars belongs to — it organises time into three cycles of sixty years and reads the compass in fine 1-degree increments.
San He, the “Triple Combinations” school, is the great landscape-compass hybrid, older than San Yuan, built around the relationships between mountain, water and direction. Its speciality is siting — and grave siting in particular — and it carries its own distinctive luopan.

How to hold the contradictions

The schools disagree because they grew in different regions and centuries and were tested against different problems. A reader does not need to pick a winner. It is enough to know which school a claim comes from, because a Flying Stars rule quoted as if it were universal feng shui is how most of the confusion in popular books begins.