The Bagua Map: How to Lay the 9-Section Energy Grid Over Your Home

What the bagua map is, in plain language

The bagua (八卦, "eight trigrams") is an arrangement of eight symbols around a center. Each symbol pairs three lines — broken or unbroken — into a glyph that names a force, a direction, a family member, a body part, a season, and a life theme. The eight surround a ninth position, the center, which is the trigram of the unity that holds the other eight in place. The full 3-by-3 arrangement is what Western practitioners call the bagua map, and it is the grid that the compass school lays on every home, apartment, office, and garden before a single prescription is written.

In practice, the map is a square divided into nine equal cells. The bottom row of three cells is the part of the home closest to the front door. The top row is the part farthest from the door. The middle row runs across the body of the home. The center cell is the heart of the home. Each cell carries the name of a trigram, the direction it points to, and the life theme it covers — wealth, family, career, partnership, children, mentors, fame, and so on. When a practitioner walks a home, they identify which cell of the grid each room falls into, and they read the room through that cell's theme.

This is the bridge from yesterday's compass-school foundation (the 24 Mountains ring, the sitting-and-facing pair) into room-level practice. The compass gives you the direction. The sitting-and-facing pair gives you the orientation. The bagua map gives you the working canvas for every prescription that follows. Without the bagua, the compass reading is abstract; with it, every cell of the home has a named quality, a named life theme, and a named set of adjustments.

The nine cells and what each one covers

The eight trigrams around the center are Qian (☰), Dui (☱), Li (☲), Zhen (☳), Xun (☴), Kan (☵), Gen (☶), and Kun (☷). Each one is a three-line glyph, each one has a name, a direction, an element, and a family role. The center is the Tai Ji, the unity, sometimes called "the health cell" in modern Western practice because the eight around it all depend on the center holding steady.

For the Western reader, the easiest entry point is the life-theme mapping rather than the trigram names. Here is the standard arrangement, with the bottom row aligned to the front door (the home's facing direction):

Read the grid as the practitioner reads it: the bottom-center cell is the entry, and the home extends "up" the grid away from the door. A room that falls in the bottom-left of the floor plan falls in the Xun cell, the wealth cell. A room in the top-right falls in the Zhen cell, the family cell. The reading is mechanical at first, and after a few homes you stop translating — the bottom-left of a floor plan just is the wealth area, the same way the bottom of any chart is the career pillar.

The themes above are the Western adaptation. The classical eight trigrams each carry dozens of associations — body parts, family roles, hexagram numbers, I Ching lines — but for room-level practice, the life-theme mapping is what the practitioner uses. When a client asks "what is the northwest corner of the bedroom for?" the answer is the knowledge cell: study, contemplation, skill-building, the parts of life that require patience and stillness. The trigram name (Gen, mountain, the youngest son in the classical family mapping) is the underlying symbol; the theme is what the practitioner talks about.

Pre-Natal vs Post-Natal: which orientation you use

There are two canonical bagua arrangements, and they differ in how the bottom row is aligned. The Pre-Natal bagua (also called Fu Xi, earlier Heaven) puts the Kun trigram (☷, earth, mother) at the bottom-north and the Qian trigram (☰, heaven, father) at the top-south. The Post-Natal bagua (also called King Wen, later Heaven) rotates the arrangement so that Kan (☵, water, middle son) is at the bottom-north and Li (☲, fire, middle daughter) is at the top-south. The Pre-Natal is the cosmological, "as-it-was" arrangement; the Post-Natal is the applied, "as-it-flows" arrangement.

For room-level practice in a home, almost every practitioner uses the Post-Natal bagua. The Post-Natal is the version that maps cleanly onto the floor plan, because the bottom row aligns with the front door and the top row aligns with the back of the home. The Pre-Natal is the version that comes up in meditation, internal alchemy, and I Ching study, where the goal is to read the cosmological pattern rather than to apply a room-level prescription.

If you have read about feng shui online, you have probably seen the Pre-Natal bagua drawn with the wealth cell in the top-left, the family cell in the top-right, and so on. That is a perfectly fine cosmological map, but it is not what you lay on a floor plan. For a floor plan, take the Post-Natal map above (the version with wealth in the bottom-left and family in the bottom-right) and rotate it so that the bottom row is the row closest to your front door. The rest of the reading follows.

How the bagua lines up with the 24 Mountains

The bagua's eight directions are a simplification of the 24 Mountains ring. Each bagua cell covers three of the 24 Mountains — 45 degrees of the compass, three trigram-line pairs, three mountain names. The wealth cell (Xun) covers the southwest 45-degree slice, which includes the Wei mountain (202.5 to 217.5), the Kun mountain (217.5 to 232.5), and the Shen mountain (232.5 to 247.5). The career cell (Kan) covers the eastern 45-degree slice, which includes the Jia mountain (75 to 90), the Mao mountain (82.5 to 97.5), and the Yi mountain (90 to 105).

This means that when a practitioner reads a home against the bagua and then layers the 24 Mountains on top, the bagua's general direction becomes the Mountains' specific direction. A room that falls in the wealth cell of the bagua is a wealth cell, but the practitioner can also say whether the room is in the Wei mountain (pure Yin Earth) or the Shen mountain (Yang Metal), and the prescription changes slightly. The bagua is the first cut; the 24 Mountains is the second cut; the annual prescriptions (Tai Sui, Flying Stars) are the third cut. The three layers together are what a complete reading uses.

How to lay the bagua on your own floor plan

The layover takes about ten minutes for a single-story home and is the most useful exercise you can do without hiring a practitioner. You need three things: a floor plan (a sketch on paper is fine), a compass or a phone with a level, and the bagua map above. The goal is to identify which cell of the 9-section grid each room falls into.

Step one is to find the front door's facing direction. Stand outside the door, hold the compass level, read the degree. The facing direction is the bottom-center of the bagua grid. If the door opens to the south, the bottom-center is south; the bottom-left is southwest; the bottom-right is southeast. The top row is the back of the home (north, northwest, northeast). Draw the grid on the floor plan with the bottom row touching the door.

Step two is to subdivide the grid into thirds. The home does not have to be a perfect square. If the floor plan is rectangular, the bagua cells become rectangular too — three columns across the width of the home, three rows from the door to the back. A long, narrow home becomes three columns by three rows of rectangles. The reading still works; the cell shapes change but the cell identities stay the same.

Step three is to identify which cell each room falls into. The kitchen in the back-left falls in the family cell. The home office in the front-right falls in the wealth cell. The bedroom at the back-center falls in the health cell, or close to it. Once each room has a cell, the room-level reading begins — which is the next piece in this series.

The most common error is to treat the bagua as a fixed overlay regardless of the door's direction. The bagua's bottom row is the front of the home, full stop. If you apply the standard "wealth is in the upper-left" diagram without rotating it to match your door, the cells land on the wrong rooms. Rotate the diagram so the bottom row is at your door, then read. This is also the error that most online bagua tutorials make, and it is why so many home bagua overlays online are wrong by one cell.

What the bagua map tells you that the compass alone cannot

The 24 Mountains ring tells you the direction the home faces. The sitting-and-facing pair tells you the pair of opposite mountains the home sits between. The bagua map tells you the life theme of each cell. The three together are what the practitioner uses to write a room-level prescription, because each room is read at the intersection of its cell (life theme), its position on the 24 Mountains (specific energy), and its year's overlay (Tai Sui, Flying Star, 5 Yellow).

For a south-facing, north-sitting home in 2026, the wealth cell (Xun, southwest) sits in the front-left of the floor plan. The 2026 wealth corner (the Flying Star 8's annual position, Wu mountain) sits in the south, which is the front-center. The two overlap only at the front-center of the home — which means the 2026 wealth activity is in a different cell than the bagua's structural wealth cell. The practitioner reads the two together: the bagua's wealth cell is a stable, structural reading (it does not change year to year); the 2026 Flying Star wealth corner is a time-bound overlay. The room that falls at the intersection (if any) gets the strongest prescription; the rooms that fall in only one of the two get the single-layer reading.

This is also why the bagua map is the practitioner's working canvas rather than the final answer. The bagua tells you "this room is in the family cell" and that is a stable, year-independent fact. The 2026 overlay tells you "the family cell is being visited by the Tai Sui this year" and that is a year-specific fact. The practitioner's reading is the combination, and the combination changes every year. The bagua is the foundation; the year's overlay is the current weather; the room-level prescription is the practitioner's synthesis of the two.

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