Joey Yap's Xuan Kong Vol. 1-An Advanced Feng Shui Homestudy Course was released to the net July 16th with little fanfare. Joey Yap is Co-Founder with Grandmaster Yap Cheng Hai of the Yap Cheng Hai Feng Shui Center of Excellence™ (YCHFSCE) headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

This is the latest online classical Feng Shui study course to hit the information highway, one of three available to netizens. You can read the full syllabus here.

The other two online courses are offered by Master Joseph Yu, and Master Larry Sang, both of North America. Joey Yap's version is priced in between the cost of the North American courses, and is available as a 20-lesson e-book in three formats: Downloadable PDF; Downloadable PDF +CD; or Downloadable PDF, CD, with Hard-copy book. Please be aware that you can't print from the PDF or CD.

In his introduction, Mr. Yap explains that the genesis for his course was to answer student questions generated by the school's YCH Professional Feng Shui Series™. Originally, the course was intended as an in-house adjunct to their professional series, but more worldly heads prevailed: the course was expanded to include information for beginning Feng Shui enthusiasts, and the course is now available to the general public.

How A Black-Hatter Can Get Good Ole' Time Classical Feng Shui Religion
by Janie Angus

If you're a Black Hatter--that is someone of the Black Hat Tibetan school of Feng Shui persuasion-and have recently decided that hanging baubles in your so-called wealth corner means bupkis when you're talking about the Feng Shui of a land development site by the sea, or a large 380-home real estate area nestled in the mountains, then this new course from Xuan Kong whiz Joey Yap is where you start.

Xuan Kong Vol. 1 (pronounced Shoo-en Gong for the Chinese-challenged amongst us) takes you from the fundamentals you have to know, if you want to know classical authentic Feng Shui, to professional applications in just under 400 pages for 20 lessons. It is written to be read and studied one lesson at a time, not devoured in one sitting. Each page is packed with information that builds on the previous lesson in a thorough substantive way.

How the great living Feng Shui Masters helped in the research

For this particular series, one of several to come in the next few years, Yap researched and translated the classical Xuan Kong texts with the help of Grand Master Yap and his Feng Shui Master friends in Taiwan and Hong Kong, one of whom is a Grand Master himself.

These Masters explained to Yap some heretofore unknown facts about the classical texts that were incorrectly translated to begin with, such as the Castle Gate and Fan Yin Fu Yin theories. This was apparently the result of Chinese translators in the 19th Century misinterpreting the even older Chinese language-which was like 16th Century Shakespearean English to them-and adding comments that have since been assumed to be part of the original classical text and handed down incorrectly ever since. An entire century got it wrong.

According to Yap during one instance of his research, a highly revered Master who was responsible for introducing the Flying Stars method and Four Pillars to the world during the mid-20th Century discussed a topic of Xuan Kong Feng Shui that he has not yet shared with anyone except his five long-time top students. This didn't just happen as part of idle tea conversation. Yap brought the topic up. A stunned Grand Master asked how he knew. When Yap replied it was part of the YCHFSCE senior syllabus, the ensuing conversation turned into a discussion of Xuan Kong Feng Shui that Yap maintains he will never forget. While the old masters may guard their secrets zealously, when they encounter a peer, they share.

Part of this topic has been sprinkled throughout the current homestudy course, albeit quietly. Astute practitioners should recognize it as new material they've never heard before, and see it reflected in some of the illustrations for the case studies. Yap promises that he will go into far greater detail in Volumes 2 and 3 due out in 2002. For now, he is more concerned about establishing the fundamentals that all schools of Feng Shui are based on.

Who the Xuan Kong course is for

First off, this is not a beginner's course, although an avid beginning student of Feng Shui will be thrilled at the amount of information packed into the 400-plus pages. A beginner, will be able to learn and follow. But seasoned practitioners will find information in the course that they won't find anywhere else. Yap calls this an advanced homestudy course for the average Feng Shui enthusiast, although he maintains this is part of the beginner's course for YCH practitioners.

Xuan Kong is part of San Yuan Feng Shui

There are two great branches of Feng Shui: San He and San Yuan. The former is 2,000 to 3,000 years old, the latter 600 years. To quote Yap, "...San He puts greater weight on land formations while San Yuan, on the Chi Distribution in the property over time." Both are used predictively in practical experience, but the methods of doing so are entirely different, and often conflict. [Please note: the so-called Form and Compass School is a bogus piece of business concocted to sell books during the past decade. It doesn't exist as a school. It's a method: you use forms, you use a compass. That's all that refers to. And if you're not using forms and a compass, then you're not doing authentic Feng Shui. You're making it up on-the-fly according to symbolic gibberish that has no business calling itself Feng Shui. It's merchandising.]

Xuan Kong is part of San Yuan Feng Shui.

The Flying Stars method (Xuan Kong Fey Xing) is a subset of Xuan Kong.

So is the Big 64 Hexagram method (Xuan Kong Da Gua.)

There are other subsets of San Yuan Feng Shui, like the Dragon Gate Eight formulas, but Yap is not concerned with them in this homestudy series.

What's in the Xuan Kong course

The course is divided into four units: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, and professional Applications, or case studies.

The first unit covers the history of the famous Xuan Kong Feng Shui masters, the concept of space and time, the fundamentals that anyone studying classical Feng Shui must know by heart, an overview of Xuan Kong to get you started, and how to plot a Flying Star chart.

The second unit discusses the components of Xuan Kong, how to use water (facing) and mountain (sitting) stars predictively and analytically, where water should and should not go in this Period and others, and how to analyze a Flying Star chart with everything you've learned up to that point given special structures.

The third unit goes into greater detail about Xuan Kong's special structures, like the standard Pearl and Parent String formations, as well as the Inverse and Hidden Siren (Fan Yin Fu Yin-which was incorrectly translated in the available Chinese classical texts on the subject,) and other formations such as Fire Burning at Heavenly Gate, The Menacing Formation, Cascading Wind and the Literature Formation to name a few. The unit ends with a discussion of the internal and immediate external factors, as opposed to grand-scale external audit features which will be addressed in future series, and ends with a discussion of how to perform a Feng Shui audit and what you should charge when you become a professional.

The fourth unit contains four case studies: an apartment unit, double-story house, commercial property, and a discussion of the Feng Shui of a house over two periods. The last lesson in this unit is a summary, which doesn't seem like a topic for a lesson. Don't overlook it; it's filled with gems.

Finally, some straight stuff on construction date vs. move-in date

One of the great debates in the classical Feng Shui world is over the construction date versus the move-in date. Which do you use to determine the chart of a house? One of the fascinating things that Yap discovered in his research travels to the Feng Shui masters in Taiwan and Hong Kong is that while these great masters may teach one thing, they use another. They use the move-in date. The reasoning for the construction date involves one of those things that has been incorrectly assumed from the great classical texts, and used incorrectly in the West in recent times because that's what western practitioners have been exposed to.

Using the move-in date embraces the Cosmic Trinity: Tien-Di-Ren, or Heaven-Man-Earth. The Cosmic Trinity also governs the changing of the Yaos, or lines, of the Guas, or trigrams, that make up part of the hexagrams of the I Ching, although the importance of this will not become paramount until Volumes 2 and 3 of this homestudy course.

Heaven luck is what you're born with and unchangeable. Man luck is what you make of yourself and your life, based on your beliefs and actions, and is changeable. (Man luck is the level that Black Hat Feng Shui operates on.) Earth luck is where authentic Feng Shui operates, and is changeable. Earth luck works whether you believe in Feng Shui or not: it works with the electro-magnetic energies of the earth.

While Yap goes into a far greater explanation, suffice it to say that using the construction date to construct a Flying Star chart removes the Man chi-or spirit or consciousness or energy-from the equation.

Put another way, it is as if the only thing that matters in insisting on the construction date reference point for a house or edifice is Heaven chi and Earth chi. The occupant, the hu-man, is discounted. His consciousness, his energy, his chi, whether that be as a Star of God, or as a Loathsome Rodent, is presumed to have no effect upon his surroundings and this is inaccurate for all but the most overwhelming of circumstances, or unless the person is a complete idiot and his chi is nil.

When a person occupies a house, he brings his consciousness and energy with him. His Man Chi can have a subtle or profound effect as it melds with the Heaven chi and Earth chi of his new surroundings. All three then operate together in this new time and space continuum indivisible: Tien-Di-Ren. The Cosmic Trinity is activated. Without Man's presence, as Yap queries in Lesson Five, "….who is getting affected if there is no one in the house when there is no life?" Man brings the Period Chi into the house. And the great Feng Shui Masters knew this.

To sum it up

The Xuan Kong Vol. 1-An Advanced Feng Shui Homestudy Course will give a beginner the foundation he or she needs to begin a serious and thoughtful practice.

Practitioners and teachers will glean new and important information to broaden and inform their own work.

Architects will be amazed how the ancient system of Feng Shui lends credence to some of the wisest ideas in Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language.

Real Estate Brokers will develop the language and syntax that will enable them to communicate effectively with Feng Shui practitioners and their own real estate clients in an efficient and mutually beneficial way.

Developers and Builders will develop an appreciation for placing houses in the best possible Feng Shui positions not only for the health and benefit of the future business or home owners, but for the health of their own bottom-line.

And Black-Hatters won't be left out in the cold as Period 8, due to start February 4, 2004, ushers in an age where the public will have tired of symbolism and merchandizing disguised as "science," and will insist on the truth based on sound, provable, knowable theory and principles, and on practitioners with a track record.

Oh, and just for the record, authentic Feng Shui is neither a spiritual path nor a religion.

To get Xuan Kong Vol. 1-An Advanced Feng Shui Homestudy Course right now, click this link: www.ychfengshui.com/xuankong