Feng Shui Art Example: Early and Later Heavens

12” square painted wood, clay and glaze

This schemata uses the form of the earth (a square faux finished as yellow sienna marble), to show the earlier heaven at the center and the later heaven at the perimeter. This is a very useful teaching tool for helping people to see the movement of chi. The relationships between chi in its acorn form (latent=early heaven) and its oak tree form (manifest=later heaven) is easy to track.

For example, if you want to see the path of the trigram β€˜li’ which is fire, you can see that it moves from the east to the south. When you want to see what happens at a given compass point, say in the north, you can clearly see it. (In this particular example, we see that the north is initially occupied by the maximum yin energy of kun, the mother, and then by kan, the yin water middle son.)

In this we see the destructive cycle (earth swallows water) the historic association of danger with the north (it is more than invasions and cold winds!) – and the relationship between the middle and the mother.