Many in the West were initially introduced to feng shui which was based on the bagua concept. Analysis was done by superimposing a bagua diagram onto a house floor plan.
However, traditionally, the bagua plays little role in the site selection of a city or house nor does it relate to the scale of form of environmental design.
In China, bagua’s relationship to feng shui began with cosmological feng shui during the Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1368-144), which analyzed a house through astrology instead of a design concept.
What is Bagua
Ba means eight and gua means trigram. Bagua comes from the Chinese classic text, I-Ching, The Book of Changes.
The book contains a divination system using 64 hexagrams made up from the trigrams.
Initially, the bagua symbols represented what the Chinese considered the eight biggest objects in nature: heaven, earth, mountain, lake, moon, sun, thunder, and wind.
Later it metaphorically represented different characteristics of objects, seasons, cardinal directions, images, and much more. Some examples include colors, numbers, body parts, and elements.
Throughout Chinese history, the bagua has been widely used in oracle, divination, fortune telling, Chinese medicine, martial arts, and the military.
