otoh

I got quite a surprise in my Tai Chi class this morning. Master Chang gave me a book, Discovering the Secret Geomancy Behind the Layouts of the Forbidden City. It’s written in Chinese, so it will be a while before I will be able to really read it, but it is filled with photos and illustrations and it is beautiful to look at. I can get the gist of some of the number sequences, their use of what we know as the Pythagorean theorem and the golden mean. The whole city (which was the imperia; palace complex) was laid out according to the principals of Tai Chi, to be in harmony with nature and express yin and yang. The same basic principals are at work in what we know as Feng Shui, but I get the impression that the way it is often practiced here in the West has lost a lot in translation.