Tilted Doors - The Edge Haven
February - March 2005

by Au Foong Yee

Learn How to Harness the Trinity of Luck in the Realm of Feng Shui

AT ONE POINT or another, you must have wondered if Mr A had the Midas touch - everything he did, decided on or touched turned to gold.

On top of this, the main door of his home actually faced a road junction - generally deemed inauspicious and avoided at all costs by many. Yet, he had more and more good luck coming his way.

So, what was he doing right?

To answer this, we have to study what is known as the Trinity of Luck or the Cosmic Trinity, which basically comprises a person's three types of luck — Heaven, Man and Earth. As all three are considered equally important, if one is able to harmonise them, he will be blessed with much good fortune.

Heaven Luck
Commonly known as fate, this is what we are all born with. Those in the Buddhist circles call this karma. Heaven Luck determines whether one is born healthy or sickly, into a wealthy or poor family. It is critical because even if a man's Man and Earth Luck were good, Heaven Luck decides whether one is a Bill Gates or an ordinary salaried worker.

Man Luck
This is each individual's initiative and therefore within his control — whether he works hard and maintains good health through proper exercise and eating habits.

Earth Luck
This is where feng shui comes in — where we have good feng shui in our residence, our office or on our business premises. In a way, Earth Luck is controlled by Man Luck in that we may or may not choose to apply feng shui principles in our home or office. Man Luck and Earth Luck are closely intertwined, affecting each other. For feng shui enthusiasts, a person who works hard and takes the initiative to practise good feng shui will enjoy good feng shui.

Grandmaster Yap Cheng Hai puts it aptly: "Heaven Luck is the boat given to you by God. Earth Luck is the wind that fills the sails and the currents of the ocean. Man Luck is the way in which you use the wind and the currents to steer your boat."

The Door and Auspicious Direction
Direction is key in feng shui and it starts with the main door of a building. The main entrance should face your good direction, which is measured down to a degree (for your auspicious direction, refer to the December 04/January 05 issue of haven).

Shifting or tilting the main entrance of a building can be a major decision, both from the practical and aesthetic point of view. These considerations, however, have not stopped more and more owners of real estate — both big and small — to effect the change.

Tilting of the door, depending on the extent, can be executed subtly and tastefully. Sometimes, the process is so well done that it goes unnoticed. At the same time, property owners have been known to tilt their main entrances purely for aesthetic or practical reasons, such as to stay out of the range of predictable and strong wind or to create more space in the home or shop.

Why is it vital for the main entrance of your building to face your best direction? It is to ensure the entry of only the auspicious qi, otherwise known as universal or living energy.

Some modern feng shui masters say changing the angle of the front door gives the building a crooked qi mouth. But the Yaps beg to differ.

Ancient feng shui masters did not have to tilt the angle of their doors and it was because town planning was unheard of those days. They could therefore build their homes according to their respective auspicious feng shui alignments. Hence the haphazard streets and layout in some old towns and villages in China.

Another case in point: The Yaps visited a Master Leaw in his home in Ganzhai, China, not too long ago. The 85-year-old feng shui master, who is a direct descendant of one of the two disciples of Yang Su Chong, had his door tilted in the early 1990s to tap his most auspicious direction. This is significant because feng shui is here today because of Yang Su Chong, an imperial astronomer and librarian.

Schools of Feng Shui
There are four major schools of feng shui—Ba Zhai (Eight Mansions), San He (Three Combinations), San Yuan (Three Cycles) and Xuan Kong Da Gua.

Ba Zhai
This school of feng shui is based on the reading that a person has four auspicious directions and four inauspicious ones. The front door of a building is deemed the single most important factor in the evaluation of the feng shui suitability of a building for its owner.

San He
This discipline combines the reading of direction (location of the real estate), dragon (represented by mountain ranges) and water (pools). San He is especially useful in determining the best initial layout planning of large-scale development projects.

San Yuan
This denotes the upper, middle and lower cycles of time and each cycle is represented by three periods of 20 years each. Time is the crucial aspect of this school of feng shui. An important and popular subsystem of San Yuan is the Flying Star feng shui. In this, the direction of the main door of a property is often used for the calculation of the Fying Star chart, which is the starting point of feng shui consultation.

Xuan Kong Da Gua
This is based on the Ba Gua expanded to 64 guas or trigrams. This form of reading is used primarily for auspicious date selection or yin feng shui.

REFER TO STOCKISTS DIRECTORY FOR DETAILS ON YAP CHENG HAI ACADEMY