Kua Number 2: The Earth Trigram and Your Eight Directions

If you were born under kua number 2, your good and bad directions are fixed by that number, not by your Chinese zodiac animal or your house facing. Kua 2 tells you which way to face at your desk, at the dining table and at the stove, and which way to point the top of your head in bed. It's one input into how a room is arranged, alongside the building itself and your BaZi chart - more on that below - but it's the one you can act on today without knocking down a wall.

Kua 2 sits in the West group, along with 6, 7 and 8. If someone in your family comes out as 1, 3, 4 or 9, they're in the East group, and their four good directions are the opposite of yours - this is why two people in the same flat sometimes get told to face different ways, and neither consultant is wrong.

What your trigram says

Kua 2 sits on Kun, the Earth trigram. Its element is Earth: not soil in a pot, but the ground underfoot - it receives and it carries. That's the plain image to hold onto. Kun doesn't push or spark; it holds weight without complaint. People sometimes want their kua trigram to be dramatic. Kun isn't. It's the trigram of load-bearing patience, and in my experience the clients who take it seriously - steady hours, steady habits - get more out of their four good directions than the ones chasing a single lucky sit.

Your own trigram direction, the one tied to Fu Wei, is Southwest. That's your anchor point, and it shows up again below.

Your four good directions

Sheng Qi, Northeast. This is your strongest direction, used for drive, income and career momentum. If you can face Northeast at your work desk, or set your main door to open that way, that's the placement worth spending effort on. It's not a switch that turns your job around by Friday; it's the direction you want your effort pointed while you're doing the actual work.

Tian Yi, West. This one governs health, recovery and the people who help you when you're down - doctors, but also the colleague who covers for you. Practitioners in Malaysia often put this to use for someone recovering from illness: bed or favourite chair angled so the top of the head, or the body when seated, points West.

Yan Nian, Northwest. This is the relationship direction - not romance specifically, but steady partnership: marriage, business partners, family cohesion. A dining table where the household faces Northwest, even a few times a week, is a common request I get from couples trying to fix a marriage that isn't broken, just tired.

Fu Wei, Southwest. This is your own trigram direction, and it's used for clarity, study and keeping your footing rather than for a big push. Students and anyone doing exam prep or close reading get told to face Southwest. It's the quiet one of the four - not the direction that gets you a promotion, the direction that helps you think straight while you're working toward it.

Your four difficult ones

Huo Hai, East. Small mishaps, friction, delay - missed buses, a printer that jams right when you need it. This is the mildest of your four bad directions. Facing East for years doesn't put you in the hospital; it just means Tuesdays feel harder than they should. Not worth rearranging a whole flat over.

Wu Gui, Southeast. Gossip, theft, arguments that start from nothing. Where this one shows up most often is the office - a desk facing Southeast where the sitter keeps getting pulled into other people's drama. Moving the desk doesn't silence the office; it just stops you being the one who absorbs it.

Liu Sha, South. Legal trouble, scandal, disputes that drag on. This sounds heavier than it usually plays out. It doesn't mean you'll get sued. It means that if there's already a dispute brewing - a contract, a boundary line with a neighbour - facing South while you deal with it tends to stretch the timeline. Address the underlying issue; the direction just isn't helping you close it fast.

Jue Ming, North. The heaviest of the four for kua 2, and I won't pretend otherwise - the name itself refers to the largest loss in this system. But "heaviest in this system" still means a bad night's sleep and low energy over months, not a curse, and it doesn't override a strong doctor, a solid job, or a good relationship. Sleeping with your head to the North occasionally because the room only allows it is not a sentence to anything. It's a direction to avoid as a habit, not fear as an event.

A worked example

Here's an actual chart, calculated for a male born in Ipoh, local date 11 January 2008. The kua number turns not on 1 January but at Li Chun, around 4 February - so a birth in early January still belongs to the previous solar year for this calculation. That's what happened here: born 11 January 2008, but because that date falls before Li Chun, the kua is worked from solar year 2007, not calendar year 2008. Anyone with a birthday in January or the first days of February should check this before trusting a quick mental calculation.

The arithmetic: take the last two digits of 2007, which are 0 and 7, and add them - 0 + 7 = 7. For a male born in 2000 or later, subtract that figure from 9: 9 - 7 = 2. The result, 2, is already a valid kua number on its own trigram, so there's no need to remap it from a discarded 5. Kua number: 2.

That "discarded 5" is worth a line on its own, since it's common - roughly one person in six ends up as kua 2, because when the raw arithmetic lands on 5, which has no trigram of its own, those people get folded into kua 2 as well. That's a larger share than most of the other numbers carry, so if you meet several kua 2s in one office, that's not a coincidence, that's the maths.

Using it in a real room

Start with where you spend hours, not where you sleep - the desk is the easiest win. If your desk can face Northeast, do that first; it's your strongest direction and the one you're using for the most hours of the day. At the dining table, Northwest if the layout allows it, for the household to sit together facing that way even a few nights a week.

The stove is a special case in this system: the classical Ba Zhai reading cares about which way you stand while cooking - the direction you face at the hob - not which way the flame points, though plenty of modern consultants argue the door of the stove matters too. Where schools disagree, I say so rather than pick a side quietly; in my experience the standing direction is the one worth prioritising if you can only fix one.

For the bed, practitioners genuinely disagree about whether direction is set by the top of the head or by the direction you face lying down. I use head direction, because that's what's fixed for hours while you're unconscious, but you'll find good consultants on the other side of that argument, and I won't pretend it's settled.

If your best direction is a wall, don't force the room. A door on the wrong wall is not something feng shui asks you to knock through. Angle the desk diagonally if the room permits it, or accept a secondary good direction like Fu Wei for study and reserve Sheng Qi for wherever it's genuinely reachable - a home office, a different chair, even a spot you use for phone calls.

Keep the bigger picture in view too: this number is one layer of the reading. The building's own facing direction, and your BaZi chart underneath it, both carry weight - a kua number tells you where to sit, not everything about how the year will go.

How to check your own number

A phone compass reads magnetic north, and for this system a feng shui compass ring is read the same way - stand still, let the needle settle, and read where it points, not where you're facing relative to the room's walls. If you want the full set of your own eight directions and sectors rather than borrowing someone else's, run your birth date and gender through the calculator at spacemirror.ru/en/kua.html - it returns your number, your trigram and all eight directions with their sectors in one pass.