GUI Management Centre research has uncovered hereto not understood significant Feng Shui meanings in Zhang Shu, Book of Burial, a fundamental text for Feng Shui applications. Previous commentators had not really understood Zhang Shu, Book of Burial.

The internal evidence of the text also indicates that Zhang Shu, Book of Burial, referred to the geographical landform of Luoyang, the ancient capital. There are also significant reference to Zi Wei Dou Shu astrology!

Zhang Shu, was written by Guo Po during the Jin dynasty, circa AD 250. This ancient text is considered a fundamental text for Feng Shui. The term "Book of Burial" would seem to say it is a text meant for Yin premises, like tombs. Yet, despite its title as "Book of Burial", the principles of Zhang Shu are widely applied to Form Luan Tou Feng Shui of Yang premises. Yes, the riddle is why a book ostentatiously labeled as for "burial" is used for premises of the living!

Guo Po had written Zhang Shu close after the end of the Han dynasty. The timing was significant. It has to do with something which occurred to the custom of burial during the Han dynasty.

• Legend of founding Han emperor Kao Tsu (High Progenitor) looking for his parents' grave. This legend is connected with origin of placing Hell money papers with stones on top on the tomb during the Qing Ming festival.

  After winning the battles to become the founding Han emperor Kao Tsu, Kao Tsu went back to the area where his parents were buried. He wanted to establish his parents in a proper tomb for honours. But, the area had become a wilderness and he was at wits end as to where his parents were buried. Desperately he asked the gods for a sign. He would throw a bunch of coloured papers into the air. The wind was blowing strongly in the area and blowing the papers into the air. Kao Tsu prayed that should a paper fall onto a grave and remain unmoved by the wind that would be his parents' grave. Sure enough, there was one piece of paper on the ground which could not be blown away by the wind. On examination, he recognised that it was his parents' grave.

  Ever since then, during Qing Ming, people imitated the custom of placing Hell money papers on tombs, with stones on top of the papers.

The incidence related above contains clues as to what really occurred with respect to the tombs of Kao Tsu's parents and that of Confucius.

What modern people do not realise is the nature of the mourning ritual associated with the dead during the period before Kao Tsu. Confucius spelt out in his Li Chi, Book of Rites, that mourning periods for the dead could last a few years according to the relationships to the dead. During these mourning periods, observations were done at the tombs themselves. But once the mourning period was over, the tombs were abandoned.

After the mourning periods, no one bothered anymore with the tombs and their remains. The tombs were left neglected and forgotten. The tombs were unmarked and within a few years their locations would be lost under the weeds and shrubs which would grow over them.

There was no disrespect to the dead. This was because once the mourning period was over, an ancestral tablet was made to be transferred to the clan ancestral temple. The dead would be remembered along with sacrifices in the ancestral temple. At the time before Kao Tsu the people did not undertaken ancestral memorials at the tombs but at the temples.

It was Han Kao Tsu who brought a radical change to the way the dead would be remembered.

Initially, Kao Tsu adopted the traditional Confucian ritual and thus abandoned his parents' tomb after the customary mourning period. The parents' ancestral tablet was likely properly taken to the ancestral temple.

But Kao Tsu now wanted a more conspicuous memorial to his parents. Hence, his pretext of returning to the area to look for his parents' tomb. Actually he just could not locate them anymore. He thus cooked up a ruse to claim someone's else grave as that of his parents! Whatever bones collected to his parents' new memorial shrine were likely those of other people.

Kao Tsu was to set a new precedent. He had unwittingly created the new custom of marking the tomb in order to continue carrying out ancestral memorial services at the tombs. Previously, people did this at the ancestral temples. With Kao Tsu, the ancestral services were extended to tombs and tombs took a new meaning in the Chinese society.

• The shift of memorial services for the dead from ancestral temples to the tombs can also be taken as a adverse Feng Shui factor which doomed future dynasties! Future dynasties were to find it hard to match the long durations of the previous Hsia-Shang-Chou dynasties, which lasted respectively 500, 700 and 1,000 years. In contrast, the Han and future dynasties could not last beyond 400 years.

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Mystery of Why Zhang Shu was Written

That was what Guo Po did. Guo Po gathered the known Feng Shui principles practised for ancestral temples. He then showed how these principles should be applied for tombs.

The ancestral services were always carried out for the dead since the dawn of the Chinese civilisation. During the Shang and Chou dynasties such ancestral services were undertaken at the ancestral temples. Only the rulers and certain high born had ancestral temples built over their tombs. But tombs never received widespread ancestral services until the arrival of Han Kao Tsu.

Zhang Shu was therefore a sort of guideline to people as to how to prepare the Feng Shui of tombs. The principles were borrowed from the ancestral temples and also from Feng Shui applied to palaces and Yang premises. The Feng Shui applied to tombs was thus no real different from that applied to Yang living premises and ancestral temples. All those so-called differences between "Yin Feng Shui" and "Yang Feng Shui" are all nonsense.

Thus, Zhang Shu is a total Feng Shui text, applicable for all types of premises. There are much in modern Feng Shui which have deviated from the original Feng Shui practised by the ancients. Modern practitioners should try to properly understand Zhang Shu in order to correct errors in modern Feng Shui practice

A lot of nonsense has been spinned about Feng Shui of tombs. It is time you find out what are the real original Feng Shui applied to tombs.

In Zhang Shu, Guo Po collated the rules which must be applied in Feng Shui of both Yang and Yin premise and show how they should be applied to tomb Feng Shui:

• Guo Po stressed the starting guideline that there is a real physical cause and effect relationship between Feng Shui of the site and how blessings confer on the descendants.

• The text then embarks into the twofold methodology of the famous maxim "Xuen Lung, Zhei Xian", Find the Dragon, Establish the Terminus.
  • First, Zhang Shu explains the rules of looking at the mountain ranges.
  • Then, second, Zhang Shu explains the necessary features of the hsueh.

  
  

• The internal evidence shows significant reference to the physical geography of Luoyang, one of the ancient capitals of China.

• Fleetingly, here and there in and especially at the end of the text, Guo Po referred to time aspects which he did not elaborated upon in Zhang Shu. These time aspects were later explained in greater details by Yang Yun Sung in his Tian Yu Jing, Heaven Jade Classics. They contains powerful secrets related to kingship and involve lost secrets of Zi Wei Dou Shu.

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