Kua Number 6: What It Means, Your Four Good Directions, and How to Use Them

If your kua number is 6, that single number tells you which compass direction to face at your desk, at your dining table, and at the stove, and which direction to keep your feet pointed away from in bed. It comes from your birth year and your gender, run through a short calculation, and it does not change over your lifetime. It is not a personality reading. It is a set of eight directions, four that work with you and four that work against you, and this article gives you all eight, exactly as they sit for number 6.

What your trigram says

Kua 6 sits on the trigram Qian (乾), which carries the element Metal. Qian's plain image is the sky over everything - not decorative, not soft. It is the trigram of something that directs and takes responsibility for the outcome. If you have ever managed a project where the buck stopped with you regardless of who did the actual work, that is closer to what Qian describes than any list of adjectives.

Kua 6 belongs to what practitioners call the West group, along with 2, 7 and 8. The other group - 1, 3, 4 and 9 - is the East group, and someone in that group has the opposite four directions working for them. If you and your partner or housemate are in different groups, you will not both get the same "good" wall, and that is worth planning around rather than arguing about.

Your own trigram direction - the one tied to your own seated position - is Northwest. That is also your best-fit direction for simply feeling settled, which the classical texts treat slightly differently from your single best direction for outcomes, which is West. I will get to both below.

Your four good directions

There are four favourable stars for kua 6, and each one is doing a different job. Do not swap them around - the pairing below is specific to this number.

Sheng Qi (生氣), West. This is your strongest direction, and it sits in the sector 247.5 to 292.5 degrees. It is used for drive - career momentum, income, the push behind getting things done. If you run a business or you are chasing a promotion, this is the direction your desk should face while you work, not while you rest.

Tian Yi (天醫), Northeast. Sector 22.5 to 67.5 degrees. This one is tied to health, recovery, and the people who actually show up when you need help - not luck in the abstract, but the practical version of it. Older practitioners lean on this direction for anyone recovering from illness; I use it the same way in my experience, facing the bed or the reading chair toward Northeast rather than treating it as decoration.

Yan Nian (延年), Southwest. Sector 202.5 to 247.5 degrees. This governs relationships - marriage, family ties, steady partnership rather than a spark. It is the direction couples are often told to face their bed toward, though as I cover below, not every practitioner agrees on how the bed should be measured.

Fu Wei (伏位), Northwest. Sector 292.5 to 337.5 degrees. This is your own seated trigram direction, and it is used for clarity and study - the direction to face when you actually need to concentrate on a document rather than push output. It is the gentlest of your four good directions, and also the one most people ignore because it does not sound exciting.

Your four difficult ones

Four directions work against kua 6. None of them means you are in danger sitting in your own home; they describe a tendency, not a sentence.

Huo Hai (禍害), Southeast, sector 112.5 to 157.5 degrees, is tied to small mishaps - friction, missed connections, delay. This is the mildest of the four. A desk facing Southeast does not doom a career; it just means things move a little slower than they should, and a project that stalls there usually has an ordinary cause you can find if you look.

Wu Gui (五鬼), East, sector 67.5 to 112.5 degrees, covers gossip, theft, arguments that seem to come from nowhere. Facing this way at a dinner table does not mean your household is fated to fight. It means, in my experience, that when tension already exists in a room, this orientation gives it less friction to burn off before it turns into a raised voice.

Liu Sha (六煞), North, sector 337.5 to 22.5 degrees, is associated with legal trouble and scandal - the long, grinding kind of dispute rather than a single bad day. If your office desk faces North, it is not a warning that you will be sued. It is a reason to keep paperwork tidy and contracts read twice, which is good practice regardless of any compass reading.

Jue Ming (絕命), South, sector 157.5 to 202.5 degrees, is the heaviest of the four for kua 6 - traditionally read as the direction of greatest loss. Even here, the honest version is: this is the direction to avoid for your main bed and your main desk if you have a choice, not a direction that will hurt you every time you pass through a room that happens to face it. Walking through a South-facing doorway on your way to the kitchen is not the same as sleeping with your head there for years.

A worked example

Here is a chart calculated for Singapore, born 12 October 2003, male. The kua calculation runs off the birth year, not the exact date, provided the birthday falls after Li Chun - the solar term around 4 February that marks the start of the kua year, not 1 January. Someone born in the first weeks of January or the first days of February needs to check whether their birthday landed before or after that turn; get it wrong and you calculate the wrong year's number entirely. For this chart, the birth date sits comfortably after Li Chun, so no shift was needed and the calculation runs straight off 2003.

The arithmetic for a male born in or after the year 2000: take the last two digits of the birth year, 0 and 3, and add them - 0 + 3 = 3. Subtract that from 9: 9 - 3 = 6. That gives a kua number of 6, on the Qian trigram, in the West group - which is exactly the chart used throughout this article. No remapping was needed here; the raw result already landed on 6.

Using it in a real room

Direction means two different things depending on what you are doing. While you work or eat, it is the direction you face - your front, your line of sight. While you sleep, practitioners disagree on what counts: some measure the direction your head points, some measure which way your body is oriented when lying down. I use the direction the top of your head points while sleeping, but say plainly that not everyone in this field agrees, and if a previous consultant told you the opposite, that is not necessarily wrong - it is a different school.

For kua 6, West is your strongest desk direction and the one to chase first if you are choosing an office or rearranging a study. If West happens to be a wall with no room to turn the desk, Northeast or Southwest cover you for health and relationships respectively - use whichever fits the room's actual layout rather than forcing a desk into a corner to chase Sheng Qi exactly. For the stove, many households in Singapore and Malaysia orient the direction the cook faces while at the burner, not the direction the stove's back sits against - check with whoever you last consulted, since this detail varies by school.

None of this replaces the building itself. A well-lit, well-ventilated room facing a difficult direction still beats a windowless one facing a good direction, and a full BaZi chart adds a layer this system does not touch at all - timing, and what a given year is likely to bring regardless of which wall you face.

How to check your own number

If you want your own eight directions run the same way this chart was, enter your birth date and gender into the calculator at spacemirror.ru/en/kua.html - it returns your kua number, your trigram, and all eight directions with their compass sectors, the same shape as the chart above. A phone compass reads magnetic north, and a feng shui compass ring is read the same way for this system - point the compass away from your body, away from anything metal, and read the number it settles on.