How to read a bagua map, one step at a time
Published 2026-08-24
Two different maps are called a bagua map, and they are read in completely different ways. This article is about the three-door version, the one from Black Sect Tantric Buddhism (BTB), where a three-by-three grid is laid over your floor plan and the front door decides which way the grid faces. If you came here for the compass version, where the eight sectors are fixed to north, northeast, east and so on, that one is a bagua map with directions and it does not use your front door at all. The difference between the two is worked through in two things called a bagua map.
Reading the three-door map is four steps. Three of them are mechanical. The fourth is where sources start disagreeing with each other, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to present one reading as the reading.
Step one: decide what counts as your home
The grid goes over an outline, so the outline has to be settled first. Draw the walls that enclose the space you live in, and stop there. What that includes is not obvious at the edges:
- Attached garage. Usually left out if you enter it from outside and it has no heat, usually included if it opens into the hallway and shares the building’s envelope. Sources split on this.
- Balcony, deck, open porch. Left out. No walls, no enclosure.
- Enclosed sun room or converted porch. Included, because it is now enclosed.
- Basement, second floor. Each floor gets its own grid. Which wall becomes the bottom of it is where teachers split: some keep the ground floor’s entrance wall so the grids stack directly, others treat the top of the stairs as that floor’s entrance, which can turn the grid. The two give different readings and they do not combine, so the choice has to be made once and kept.
This step matters more than it sounds. Taking the garage in or out moves every cell boundary across the width of the plan, which is enough to put a room in a different cell than it was in before.
Step two: find the wall with the front door
The front door is the door the building was designed to be entered by — the one facing the street, with the house number on it. Not the door from the garage that you actually use, and not the back door onto the yard.
The wall that door sits in becomes the bottom of the grid. That is the whole role the door plays: it orients the grid. Turn your plan so that wall is toward you, and the grid is now the right way up.
If the door is in a corner, or the entrance is recessed, or the building has several doors of equal standing, that question has its own answer in which door counts in an apartment.
Step three: divide the outline into nine
Split the outline into three equal parts across and three equal parts deep, giving nine cells.
The grid stretches to fit. It is not a square laid on top and it is not measured in feet — a long narrow apartment gets nine long narrow cells. Every cell is one ninth of the width and one third of the depth, whatever the shape happens to be.
Where the outline is not a plain rectangle, part of a cell can fall outside the walls. That is what the tradition calls a missing corner, and how much of a cell has to be absent before it counts is itself disputed.
Step four: read the nine cells
With the entrance wall at the bottom, the cells are named like this:
| left | middle | right | |
|---|---|---|---|
| far wall | Wealth | Fame | Love |
| middle | Family | Health | Children |
| entrance wall | Knowledge | Career | Helpful People |
Read from where you stand in the doorway looking in. Your front door always opens into Career in this system, because the door defines the bottom row — the entrance strip is Career by construction, not by coincidence. The far-left corner as you walk in is always Wealth, for the same reason.
Each cell carries a trigram, an element and a set of associated colors:
- Wealth — Xun 巽, Wood, purple and green. Also called Prosperity or Abundance.
- Fame — Li 離, Fire, red. Also called Reputation or Recognition.
- Love — Kun 坤, Earth, pink, red, white. Also called Relationships or Partnership.
- Family — Zhen 震, Wood, green. Also called Ancestors or Elders.
- Health — the center, Earth, yellow and earth tones. Also called the Tai Chi.
- Children — Dui 兌, Metal, white and pastels. Also called Creativity or Completion.
- Knowledge — Gen 艮, Earth, blue, green, black. Also called Skills or Self-cultivation.
- Career — Kan 坎, Water, black and dark blue. Also called Path in Life.
- Helpful People — Qian 乾, Metal, gray, white, silver. Also called Benefactors or Mentors.
What the reading gives you, and what it does not
Once the grid is down you know which rooms fall in which cells. That is the output: a mapping. A bathroom in the Wealth cell, a bedroom straddling Family and Health, a kitchen in Career.
What happens next is advice, and the advice is where this tradition is at its loosest. The common recommendations are about keeping cells clear and lit, and about matching an object or a color to the cell’s element. None of that is derived from anything — there is no calculation behind “put something purple in the far-left corner” the way there is a calculation behind a compass bearing. It is an association, passed along, and different teachers pass along different ones.
So a fair way to use the reading is as a description of your home rather than as a set of instructions. Where you have a room you dislike and the grid gives you a name for that part of the plan, the name is a place to start thinking. Where the grid tells you to move a bed on the strength of a label, the compass system has an actual reason for a bed position and this one does not.
Where this disagrees with the compass map
The two maps put things in different places on purpose, and neither is a broken version of the other. The three-door grid is anchored to your front door, so it rotates with the building’s entrance. The compass map is anchored to magnetic north, so it does not rotate at all.
For a home whose front door happens to face north, the two agree almost everywhere. For a home whose front door faces south, the wealth area in one system lands roughly where the other puts fame. This is not an error either side is making — they are answering different questions, and mixing a cell name from one with a direction from the other produces a reading that neither tradition would recognize.
You can lay the three-door grid on your own plan with the bagua map tool, which draws the outline, the entrance wall and the nine cells, and marks any part of a cell that falls outside the walls.