A Fallacy in Understanding Feng Shui: Is a Kind Heart More Powerful Than Feng Shui?

　　At some point this fallacy began to circulate, and it truly misleads the world. A kind heart may of course bring greater peace in poverty, but it can never outweigh feng shui.

　　This is because feng shui is an objective effect of existence, not something swayed by subjective human intention.

　　The story people usually love to tell: a feng-shui master, thirsty, met an old woman who gave him hot water with bran floated on top—but in the countryside bran is pig feed, so the master was furious. As it happened she needed to choose a burial site, so he chose an ominous one for her. Yet ten years later he returned to the old place and found her family thriving, and learned that she had put bran on the hot water because he had traveled far and worn out and could not drink cold water suddenly; the hot water might scald him, so bran was added to let him blow and sip without burning. The story thus concludes: a kind heart is far more important than feng shui.

　　Is that really the case? The truth is harsh—this story is fabricated.

　　Tracing it now: the original version of the story was orally told by a folk person in Qingtian County in 1983 and recorded as a folk tale. At the same time, the story has been heavily altered, and these alterations are clearly malicious.

　　Here is the original story:

　　In the past, a feng-shui man from Ruian came to Qingtian to look at feng shui. He climbed a hilltop and walked into a pavilion to ask for tea. The old woman serving tea brought a bowl of hot tea and put in a pinch of rice husk chaff. The yin-yang man was furious: chaff is for feeding pigs—treating me like a pig is an utter insult! But his thirst was unbearable, so he had no choice but to blow the chaff aside and drink the tea.

　　The yin-yang man then wanted to do the old woman harm. He said to her: “I am a yin-yang man who looks at feng shui, specializing in choosing dragon acupoint grave sites for families. Does your family need a grave site chosen?” The old woman said: “Sir, you have come just in time—I was about to send someone to Ruian to fetch a yin-yang man!”

　　The yin-yang man looked east and west and chose for her a death-and-extinction site. The old woman of the tea pavilion, not knowing the reason, made it into a grave site as told and buried the old man's corpse there.

　　Ten years later, the yin-yang man again passed that pavilion and saw it had changed beyond recognition: carved beams and painted rafters, clean chairs and tables; the pavilion old woman was healthier than ten years before, her face glowing. Seeing the yin-yang man, she pulled him home to eat, saying it was all thanks to his having chosen a good grave site—the whole family had prospered, some becoming officials, some in trade; both descendants and wealth flourishing.

　　The pavilion old woman spoke, then poured him another cup of hot tea, still putting in a pinch of chaff. The yin-yang man was puzzled and asked: “Chaff is for feeding pigs—why do you put chaff in the tea?” The old woman said: “Sir, travelers like you climb from the foot of the mountain to the top, your whole body hot and sweating, thirst unbearable. If there were no chaff and you gulped it down at once, you would fall ill. With a pinch of chaff, you must blow and sip, drinking slowly—only then will it not harm the body.”

　　The yin-yang man was suddenly enlightened, his face red with shame. Fortunately his yin-yang was fake; otherwise wronging the pavilion old woman's whole family would have been a monstrous injustice.

　　Oral source and compiler: Wu Man
　　Time: 1983
　　Place: Wu'an Village
　　Area of circulation: Qingtian County

　　The protagonist in the story is not a great feng-shui master but merely an ordinary feng-shui man. The widely circulated version that has a “feng-shui master” do sinister deeds is in fact rather malicious in intent.

　　Feng-shui masters mentioned in antiquity were all renowned figures with real skill—unlike most modern “masters,” whose fame is largely packaging and hype, with limited ability.

　　Truly to become a master-level figure in feng shui, one must have grasped the feng-shui core of the working of Heaven and Earth's upright qi—and this cannot be without virtue and character. So one could never, because of a country old woman's momentary act, form the intention to harm the other party. Even if the old woman truly had ill intent, one would only laugh it off.

　　Only ordinary folk feng-shui men of uneven quality might do such a thing—and first of all such men are not necessarily reliable in skill. What virtue and what ability could they claim the title “master”?

　　More importantly, the story was originally not meant to encourage kindness at all, but fabricated as a tale against feudal superstition.

　　Why say the story is invented? Look again at this older story:

　　A young man was traveling on a hot day, desperately thirsty. Passing through a village, he saw an old woman washing clothes by a well and went over to beg for water. The old woman drew water from the well, poured it into a bowl, then grabbed a handful of rice husk chaff from a nearby storehouse and sprinkled it into the bowl before handing it to the young man.

　　Seeing a layer of chaff floating in the bowl, the young man was very displeased, thinking the old woman too stingy—giving only a bowl of water and not letting him drink his fill. Helpless, he was truly too thirsty and, without more ado, went to drink. Because chaff floated over the bowl, he had to blow a breath of chaff before each sip. Blow and sip, blow and sip—it took a long time to finish the water, and he returned the bowl to the old woman with an unhappy face.

　　The old woman only said cheerfully: “How is it—had enough? Don't be upset. Traveling on a hot day, gulping cold water suddenly will injure the spleen and stomach. I deliberately sprinkled chaff in the bowl so that you would sip slowly, mouthful by mouthful—only then will it not spoil your stomach.”

　　The husks stripped from rice by milling are called long糠 (rice-bran chaff). The reason for stressing this term is that the prototype of this folk tale was actually about “chaff tea”—and that story is the one truly widely circulated.

　　What the story also emphasizes is that drinking cold water when desperate injures the intestines and stomach. This is an important piece of knowledge, logically self-consistent, belonging to a mature folk tale.

　　In the later altered story, because of misunderstanding, or because the tale blurred as it circulated, it was changed to hot tea. But the hot-tea version obviously invites questions: if it is hot water, naturally one would drink more slowly—why still need bran? Clearly the plot is not mature.

　　Here one can see that the original story had nothing to do with feng shui at all. The version linking it to feng shui is obviously a modification of that story—simply put, pure invention. So many misleading sayings circulate in the market; trace them to the root and many are baseless fabrications.

　　A kind heart is important, yes—but blindly insisting that a kind heart is omnipotent is another matter. One often hears of people bewitched by such notions, believing kindness is all-powerful, so they release animals and recite sutras, refuse medical care, skip the hospital when ill and treatment when needed—and as a result a condition that could have been reversed grows ever more severe.

　　Feng shui is much the same: whether you believe or not, kind or not—it is there.