Turning the House, and How to Judge One

When a house goes wrong, you turn it — you do not abandon it

The remedy for a declining house is architectural, not ritual. If the house is failing, turn it: dismantle on the punitive-calamity side, add and improve on the virtue-and-fortune side, and adjust the walls. The commentary adds the plainest possible gloss — if the year is going badly, or there is quarrelling and illness, rework the bad side and strengthen the good one, and the trouble clears.

Then the author draws a line that matters. When judging a house, what counts is the direction it faces after movement, not whether it is on the north or east of the street. And the rules of heavenly and monthly virtue outrank the folk prohibitions: when life-giving energy arrives at a position, build there, and do not worry about the General, the Year Star, the Leopard Tail and the rest — because all those spirits and the five-surnames and sixty-cycle tables were themselves generated from the two energies.

But there is a limit. If the punitive killing is actually sitting on the bad side, even the arrival of heavenly virtue does not license you to build there. The principle governs; the specialist tables are derivative.

For a modern reader this chapter is unusually clear-headed: it tells you to prefer the underlying logic over the accumulated superstition, and it gives you a repair strategy — subtract from the weak side, add to the strong side — that needs no belief system at all.