In feng shui, the term "sitting and facing" points to the most basic concept describing the direction in which a site is placed. Here, "sitting" means the direction one backs onto, that is, the side the rear of a site looks toward, while "facing" means the direction that site looks squarely upon. It becomes easy to grasp if you picture a person seated in a chair, back resting against the wall and gaze turned out the window. The space behind the back is the sitting, and what lies before the eyes is the facing. These two always form exact opposites, standing precisely one hundred and eighty degrees apart. So if the sitting is north, the facing is naturally south; if the sitting is east, the facing is west. Because once only the backing side of a site is fixed the facing side follows of its own accord, the sitting and facing of a site are settled at once as a single pair.
Sitting and facing serve as a measure used throughout, whether for a yang dwelling that examines a home where the living reside, or a yin site that examines a resting place for ancestors. The grain of application differs a little, however. In a yin site, the side where the head is laid is taken as the sitting and the side toward which the feet stretch as the facing, so one weighs which mountain that place backs onto and which field it looks upon. In a yang dwelling, one compares the side the building backs onto with the side where the gate or front opens, observing which direction the whole house looks toward and draws its energy from. The reason people of old fixed the sitting and facing first when building a home is that they held the way one receives sunlight, wind, and watercourses to differ greatly depending on which side a site backs onto and which it looks upon, even on the same land.
When reading sitting and facing, two strands of directional sense work together. One is an absolute bearing taken from the courses of the sun and stars, that is, the heavenly bodies. The fixed coordinates of the four cardinal points belong here. The other is a relative bearing arising from the terrain around the site. The side where a valley opens and the view stretches wide, the side toward which water flows away, belong here. In actual feng shui, these two senses are not read apart but overlaid as one. A grand framework is set by the absolute bearing, yet only by adding which way the land actually opens its embrace does a living sitting and facing finally take shape.
The instrument used traditionally to gauge this subtle direction is the luopan, the feng shui compass commonly called the pacheol. It is a round device with a magnetic needle set at the center, around which concentric rings are densely inscribed with bearings, stems and branches, and the eight trigrams. A feng shui practitioner would lay it level at the center of a site, read the direction in which the needle came to rest, and pin down the sitting and facing with precision. It was a refined measurement, weighed mark by mark against the gradations inscribed around the rim, not a rough guess pointed out by hand. Within a tool no larger than a small palm dwells the old wisdom that sought to hold the bearings of heaven and the grain of the earth together in one place.
Read anew through today's eyes, sitting and facing unfold, in the end, into a story about how a home and a site receive light, wind, and scenery. That a site sheltered firmly behind for a sense of stability and opened wide in front so that sun and wind enter well was regarded as good touches the long-standing sense for life that seeks out an environment comfortable and healthy for a person to dwell in. To know sitting and facing is less a matter of memorizing a mysterious secret than of being clearly aware of which direction the place you dwell in looks toward and what it backs onto. The feng shui stories that FortuneLeaf offers, too, set out from such awareness. To know a direction means to look once more at the place where you stand, and that small looking becomes the first step toward tending the spaces of daily life a little more fondly.