Feng shui bagua map
Nine squares laid over your floor plan, lined up with the wall your front door is in. Give the room's size and where the door is, then click anywhere on the plan to see which area that spot falls in. If your home is L-shaped, it will also tell you which areas the missing corner takes out.
Click anywhere on the plan.
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Pick a spot and this panel will tell you which of the nine areas it sits in.
What the cut-out takes out
In this tradition a corner outside the footprint is called a missing area. Practitioners differ on what to do about it — mirrors, lighting and planting on the outside boundary are all common suggestions, and none of them has a test attached.
The nine areas
| Area | Also called | Element | Trigram |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wealth | Prosperity, Abundance | Wood | Xun (巽) |
| Fame | Reputation, Recognition | Fire | Li (離) |
| Love | Relationships, Marriage, Partnership | Earth | Kun (坤) |
| Family | Ancestors, Elders, New Beginnings | Wood | Zhen (震) |
| Health | Center, Wellbeing, Tai Chi | Earth | 太極 |
| Children | Creativity, Completion | Metal | Dui (兌) |
| Knowledge | Skills, Self-cultivation, Study | Earth | Gen (艮) |
| Career | Path in Life, Journey | Water | Kan (坎) |
| Helpful People | Benefactors, Travel, Mentors | Metal | Qian (乾) |
Where this map comes from
This is the three-door bagua, taught in the West since the 1980s and often called BTB or Black Sect. Its defining move is that it ignores the compass: the grid is lined up with the wall your front door is in, so the front door always opens into the career strip and the far-left corner is always wealth, in every home ever built.
That is also what makes it quick. You need a floor plan and a front door, and nothing else. The compass bagua answers the same question with real bearings, and because it turns with the building it puts the areas somewhere else. Both are in wide use. Neither is a fake, and mixing them gives you a map that belongs to neither.
We describe what the tradition says and where it puts things. We are not going to tell you that clearing a corner will change your income — that claim has no test attached, and pretending otherwise would be the easy thing rather than the honest one.
Which door, and what if there are several
Use the door you come home through, not a side gate or a garage entrance you happen to use more often. If your home is an apartment, the practice is to use the apartment's own front door rather than the building's lobby entrance.
You can also lay the same nine squares over a single room, using that room's doorway. The map then describes that room rather than the home. Doing both at once is normal in this tradition — a room can sit in one area of the home and have its own nine inside it.
L-shaped plans
A rectangle contains all nine areas. An L-shape does not: the cut-out corner takes one or two of them outside the footprint. Which ones depends entirely on where the front door is, because the grid rotates with it. The same missing corner is the wealth area with the door in one wall and the helpful-people area with the door in another.
The tool marks a cell as missing only when it is entirely outside the footprint, and as partial when the cut-out clips it. A small notch that trims a corner is not the same thing as an area that is not there at all, and lumping the two together would overstate it.