Why the Great Wall of China was not built according to feng shui, and what it may threaten today

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

A person loves simple solutions: swallow a pill to get well, invest a ruble to get rich and, of course, arrange furniture in such a way to immediately solve all problems and become happy. It is this simplified version of the ancient Chinese teaching that was created in America in the 1980s especially for the common people. Despite the fact that today classical science does not seriously consider the principles of feng shui, this practice is enjoying increasing success in the world.

When feng shui is called "an ancient Chinese teaching", then in principle they do not sin against the truth, unless they overdo it, naming the terms in 5-6 thousand years. It is believed that this system arose as a derivative of the teachings of the Chinese philosophers of the Song dynasty (960-1270), who regard Nature as a single living organism. The four main sections of this organism (general order "li", numerical proportions of the Earth and the Universe "shu", vital breath "qi" and forms of manifestation of Nature "yin") must coexist in harmony, and then everything will be fine in a specific area of space.

Most modern gurus teaching "ancient wisdom" forget to tell (or do not know themselves) that this teaching was born from the highly developed Chinese cult of the dead. In the vast Empire in antiquity, there was no tradition of creating common cemeteries, and each family buried its dead members where it seemed most convenient for them. It was the calculations of burials that the first masters of feng shui were originally engaged in - so that what returns to Nature from the human world does not violate its harmony. Moreover, the roots of the doctrine really go back centuries, although not so far: archaeologists have established that approximately the same principles of burial were applied already in the 9th century BC. Applying similar approaches in the construction of buildings and the arrangement of furniture began much later - in the Middle Ages.

By the 19th century, when the Europeans began to actively cooperate with the Chinese, they faced enormous difficulties. It turned out that without careful approval, engineers cannot even install a telegraph pole, let alone build houses, offices, or build roads. All foreigners who got acquainted with the feng shui system noted that the calculations made using it are incredibly complex and. Feng Shui is truly deeply embedded in the life of Chinese society. Real tragedies also happened on this basis: for example, when the governor of the Portuguese colony of Macau decided to build a railway along the shortest distance, and not according to the canons of the harmony of Nature, he was trapped and cut off. Ernst Eitel, a famous Sinologist who worked in China for many years, wrote on this subject:

This may be another reason for the global spread of feng shui in China in the past centuries. Numerous bureaucrats in a bloated administrative apparatus quickly figured out how to capitalize on ancient wisdom. Johann de Groot, who worked for a long time in the Dutch colony on the island of Amoy, described in detail the sophisticated system of extortion by Chinese officials in resolving conflicts arising from the harmonization of energy flows, for example,when the carefully planned and calculated burial of one family seriously compromised the potential well-being of another. Profiting from this situation was not only the two master geomancers who carried out the research, but also all the local authorities who participated in the resolution of the dispute.

Thanks to the works of sinologists, at the end of the 19th century, feng shui was learned all over the world. But the triumphant procession of the teachings began only after it was adapted to the more mundane Western philistine consciousness. In the 20th century, people began to demand simple solutions, so a sophisticated system was turned into a collection of recipes that were simple enough to understand and implement. The updated version is now called "symbolic feng shui". The author of the new release, Thomas Lin Yu, an American of Chinese origin, who taught ancient teachings in the United States, published several textbooks in 1986, having managed to cash in on it quite well. He was followed by a huge army of textbook authors, course and seminar leaders, who carried the ancient wisdom in a new format to the masses. The renewed teaching is quite different from its ancient Chinese prototype. So, for example, such useful attributes as amulets and talismans appeared in it. So the famous feng shui toads are Chinese folklore, which was added to the doctrine of universal harmony to give it a national flavor, and as an extra way to get money out of the "initiates".

Thus, the "ancient Chinese teaching" came to our country not from China (with which, by the way, we have a huge common border), but from the west. At the change of centuries and epochs, when new spiritual landmarks appeared like mushrooms after rain, "feng shui of a new bottling" took its rightful place, just somewhere between astrology and bioenergetics, pushing out ufology. However, the following decades have shown that this doctrine has much more promise than most pseudosciences - the current state of affairs proves this. Numerous courses, schools, and experienced professionals in the field are flourishing today. This commercial product is very successfully sold on the market, enjoying a stable demand from ordinary people.

I would like to give just one more historical example from the field of architecture. In 210 BC, the famous commander Meng Tian died, who supervised the construction of the Great Wall of China. His last words were recorded in the chronicles: - the commander admitted bitterly. Until the end of his life, he was worried about whether this giant brainchild would be durable, which, due to its enormous size, he could not harmonize with the principles of feng shui. It seems that this long-term experiment has shown that sometimes, even without ancient wisdom, a fairly strong building can be obtained.

The ways of development of science are sometimes very intricate. So, for example, 10 random discoveries were made thanks to ancient art