When you and your house disagree
Published 2026-08-20
If your own Kua number puts you in the East group and your building’s chart puts it in the West group, then all eight sectors of that home disagree between the two charts. Not most of them, not the awkward corners — all eight, every time, in every one of the sixteen East-person-in-a-West-house combinations and the sixteen the other way round. Nothing inside Eight Mansions (八宅, Ba Zhai) resolves it.
There is no trick that makes it come out even. What there is instead is a widely used working split, a practical convention rather than a rule from the tradition.
Two charts, two inputs
The reason they can disagree at all is that they are separate calculations.
| The house chart | Your chart | |
|---|---|---|
| Input | The building’s sitting direction | Your birth year and sex |
| Answers | Which sector each room should be in | Which direction you should face |
| Changes when | You move, or a wall moves | Never |
| Computed by | Compass bagua map | Kua number calculator |
Both run the same arithmetic — eight stars worked out from a seat direction — which is exactly why they can be laid on top of each other and compared. The house’s seat is its sitting direction. Yours is the direction of your own trigram. When those two seats fall in opposite groups, every sector one chart calls favored, the other calls weak.
What eight-out-of-eight looks like
Take a home whose front faces northeast. That sits southwest, which is a Kun house, gua 2, West group. Put a man born in mid-1990 in it: he comes out Kua 1, East group. This is what the two layers say about his rooms.
| Sector | The Kun house says | His own chart says |
|---|---|---|
| North | Jue Ming — weak | Fu Wei — favored |
| Northeast | Sheng Chi — favored | Wu Gui — weak |
| East | Huo Hai — weak | Tian Yi — favored |
| Southeast | Wu Gui — weak | Sheng Chi — favored |
| South | Liu Sha — weak | Yan Nian — favored |
| Southwest | Fu Wei — favored | Jue Ming — weak |
| West | Tian Yi — favored | Huo Hai — weak |
| Northwest | Yan Nian — favored | Liu Sha — weak |
Eight rows, eight disagreements. The northeast corner is the best sector this house has and one of the four he is told to avoid. The southeast is the reverse.
One thing that surprises people: which of the four numbers in your group you are makes no difference to this. Every East group number — 1, 3, 4 and 9 — treats north, east, southeast and south as the favored four, and every West group number treats northeast, southwest, west and northwest that way. The stars land in different order inside those four, but the four sectors themselves are a property of the group. So agreement with a house is decided entirely by group, and a person in a matching house agrees with it on all eight sectors — four both call favored, four both call weak.
What our tools do with it
The full home report checks this and raises it as a warning rather than quietly picking a side. The text it prints is short enough to quote in full:
You are East group and the house is West group, so all eight sectors disagree between the two charts. Nothing inside Eight Mansions resolves this. The common approach is to follow the house for where rooms go, since you can move furniture but not walls, and follow your own chart for which way you face.
It is flagged at medium severity, below the two we treat as urgent — a bearing on a sector edge, and a birth date on the day the year turned — because those two mean the numbers may be wrong. A group mismatch means the numbers are right and point different ways.
The common approach, and why it is not the answer
The convention in the quote above is common, sensible and not authoritative. It divides the work by what you can actually change:
- Where rooms go — bedroom, main door, bathroom, storage — follows the house, because you can move furniture and you cannot move walls.
- Which way you face — head of the bed, seat at a desk, the stove mouth — follows your own chart, because that is the question your own chart was built to answer.
The reasoning is practical rather than textual, and it has a real virtue: the two halves never compete, since one is about location and the other about direction. It also has a cost. Under this split, a West group person in an East group house sleeps in a room the house favors while facing a direction the house reads as weak, and nothing in Eight Mansions blesses that combination. Other practitioners weight it the other way and let the occupant’s chart choose the room. Some read the house for the household and the personal chart only for the person’s own bedroom. All of these are in use.
The compass bagua map takes both a bearing and a birth date and marks each sector as agreed or split, which is the table above run on your own numbers.
Two practical points that follow
A mismatch is not a reason to move. The tradition has no clause saying an East group person cannot live in a West group house, and half of the sixty-four house-and-person pairings are mismatches. Treat it as a chart you have to read carefully, not a fault.
Your group decides how much room shape costs you. A headboard flat against a wall points in one of four directions, so the diagonals are only reachable by pulling the bed off the wall. East group numbers have three of their four favored directions on cardinals — north, east and south — and only the southeast off the grid. West group numbers have exactly one, west, and three diagonals. So in a plain rectangular room a West group person has one wall that works on direction, whichever house they are in. That is a separate constraint from the group mismatch, and it stacks on top of it.
Two related pieces if you need them: east group and west group explains where the split comes from, and a feng shui bedroom for couples with different directions covers the other kind of disagreement, where two people in one bed are in opposite groups.
Neither chart predicts anything about the people living there, and a mismatch between them does not predict anything either. Method and assumptions says where we stop.