Two things are called a bagua map
Published 2026-08-20
If you have found two bagua maps that disagree, nothing has gone wrong. Two different layouts share the name. One is aligned to real compass bearings and turns with the building; the other ignores the compass entirely and is aligned to the wall your front door sits in. They put the same life areas in different corners of the same home, and both are in wide use.
So the useful question is not which is correct. It is which one the page in front of you is using.
The two systems
| Compass bagua | Three-door bagua | |
|---|---|---|
| Aligned to | Real compass directions | The wall your front door is in |
| You need | A bearing for the building | A floor plan and the door position |
| The map | Rotates with the building | Always the same way round |
| Number of areas | Eight sectors of 45° | Nine squares, including a center |
| Area names | The eight trigrams and their stars | Wealth, Fame, Love, Career and so on |
| Also called | Classical, traditional, Eight Mansions | BTB, Black Sect, Western feng shui |
The compass version is the one this site’s compass bagua map computes, along with the house sector chart and the Kua number calculator. The three-door version is what our bagua map computes. We build both and we are not going to tell you either one is fake.
How to tell which one you are reading
Any one of these settles it.
Does the source ask for a compass bearing? If it wants degrees, or the direction the front of your home looks out on, it is the compass school. The three-door method never needs a bearing. Conversely, if the instruction is “stand in your front door looking in”, the compass plays no part.
Count the areas. The compass map has eight sectors and no ninth. The three-door map has nine squares, because the middle of the grid is an area in its own right — usually called Health, the center, or Tai Chi. If you are looking at a nine-cell grid with a labeled middle, it is the three-door one.
Read the area names. Wealth, Fame, Love, Family, Children, Knowledge, Career, Helpful People and the center are the three-door names. Sheng Chi, Yan Nian, Tian Yi, Fu Wei, Huo Hai, Wu Gui, Liu Sha and Jue Ming are the compass names. The two vocabularies do not overlap at all.
Ask what happens if the house is turned around. Under the three-door method the front door always opens into the career strip and the far-left corner from it is always the wealth area — in every home ever built, on every continent. Under the compass method nothing is fixed to the door; turn the building and every label moves. A source that gives you a single fixed corner for wealth without asking anything about your home is the three-door one.
Watch for the words. “Classical”, “traditional”, “Eight Mansions”, “Ba Zhai”, “flying stars” and “sitting direction” mark the compass side. “BTB”, “Black Sect”, “Black Hat”, “three-door” and “Western feng shui” mark the other.
Why they land in different places
Take a home with the front door in the south wall, so you walk in heading north. Your left hand points west, so the far-left corner as you come in is the northwest corner of the building.
- Three-door. The grid is laid out from the door wall. That far-left corner is the wealth area, and it would be the wealth area no matter which way the building pointed.
- Compass. A home facing south sits north, which Eight Mansions calls a Kan house. In a Kan house the northwest sector reads as Liu Sha, one of the four weak sectors. There is no wealth area in this system at all; the nearest equivalent is the Sheng Chi sector, and for a Kan house that is the southeast — roughly the opposite corner.
Now move the front door to the north wall and change nothing else. You walk in heading south, your left hand points east, and the far-left corner is now the southeast corner of the building.
- Three-door. Still the wealth area. The label followed the door.
- Compass. A home facing north sits south, which is a Li house, and the southeast sector of a Li house reads as Tian Yi — one of the four favored sectors.
Same corner label from the three-door map in both homes, opposite verdicts from the compass map. That is what happens when one system is anchored to a door and the other to magnetic north.
Which one should you use
We are not going to pick for you, and we would be making it up if we did.
The compass method needs a bearing you can actually take, and it will not work at all if you cannot get one — a windowless interior unit, a building whose front is ambiguous, a strong local magnetic disturbance. In return it distinguishes between homes, and it separates two questions that the three-door method does not have: where a room sits in the building, which comes from the building’s sitting direction, and which way a person faces, which comes from that person’s birth year.
The three-door method needs a floor plan and a front door, nothing else, and it gives the same answer for any home with the same shape and door position. That makes it quick and repeatable, and it is why it spread in the West. It also means it cannot tell two identically-shaped homes apart, and it has no personal layer keyed to your birth year.
What neither of them does is produce a checkable outcome. The area names on the three-door grid and the star themes on the compass chart are labels the traditions attach to places. They are not forecasts, and the moment a source starts telling you what clearing a corner does to your income, it has left both systems behind. See method and assumptions for where we stop.
The one thing we will say plainly: pick a lane before you move furniture. Reading your compass sectors and then applying a three-door remedy to them produces a map that belongs to neither tradition, and there is no version of feng shui in which that is the correct answer.