Vastu

Personal directions

Ba Zhai sorts the eight directions into four that suit you and four that do not, from a single number worked out from your birth year. Two people in the same room face different ways under it — which is the part no floor plan can tell you.

Birth details

The time matters more than anything else here. Two hours out and the ascendant moves a whole sign, which rearranges every house in the chart.

Gender (optional)

Two readings are defined in terms of it — the Kua number in vastu and the luck pillars in the Chinese chart — and neither has a formula for anything beyond male and female. Answer “other” or leave it and those two say so instead of guessing. Nothing else in your chart uses it.

This is the one page that needs the gender question answered. Ba Zhai has a formula for male and one for female and none for anything else, so leaving it, or answering “other”, produces no number rather than a guessed one. You will still get a result — it will tell you which of those two happened.

What the Kua number is

One digit, one to nine with five redirected, worked out from the year you were born and whether the formula for men or the formula for women applies. It sorts the compass into an east group and a west group, and puts you in one of them. Everything on this page follows from that single number.

The year it uses is not the calendar year. The Chinese year turns at Lichun, around the 4th of February, so somebody born in the third week of January belongs to the year before the one on their passport. That is five weeks of every year that a calendar cutoff would get wrong, which is why this asks for the hour and the place as well — Lichun is a moment, not a date, and a birth on the 4th can fall either side of it.

Why it sits in the vastu section

Because that is where people look for it. Ba Zhai is Chinese and vastu is Indian; neither was derived from the other and they disagree often enough that reconciling them would mean inventing a third system. Where they conflict, both are shown and the conflict is named — there is no averaged verdict here, and a single confident answer built out of two traditions that contradict each other would be the least honest thing on the site.