Feng shui literally means wind and water, and it refers to a traditional view of geography that reads the movement of qi, the energy flowing through land and space, in order to weigh the fortune of the places where people live. Within the shapes of nature, where mountains rise and rivers wind, an invisible energy was thought to gather and disperse, and a site where that energy was well held was called a place of great virtue. This way of thinking was never merely a technique for divining good ground; it touched on an ancient question about how human beings ought to live in harmony with nature.
Several accounts are handed down about where the name comes from. A widely known one traces it to the phrase about storing wind and gaining water, from which the two words wind and water were drawn. Strong wind was believed to scatter qi, while still, gathered water was thought to keep it in place, so a site sheltered from wind and close to water was held to be foremost. This is said to be why feng shui took the most basic natural elements, wind and water, for its very name.
As a body of theory, feng shui was refined in China over a long span of time. The Jinnangjing, said to have been composed by Guo Pu of the Jin dynasty, is regarded as a text that set out the principle that qi rides the wind and scatters but stops when it meets water, and it is counted as a classic that laid the foundation for later feng shui theory. Afterward feng shui branched into a current that examined the forms of mountains and rivers and a current that reckoned with direction and underlying principle, growing ever more elaborate and serving widely in choosing sites for homes, villages, and graves.
In Korea, too, feng shui put down deep roots. In the Three Kingdoms period it took hold by merging with native notions of geography that held the land to be sacred, and by the Goryeo era the monk Doseon is said to have surveyed the mountains and rivers of the whole country and set forth the idea of remedial feng shui. The notion of strengthening the land by raising temples or pagodas where its energy was weak remained a distinctive shade of Korean feng shui. In the Joseon period it settled deep into daily life, joined to the task of choosing the dwellings and ancestral burial grounds of the scholar elite within a Confucian order.
Today feng shui is not received merely as an art of divining fortune. It is being studied anew as a wisdom of site selection, an environmental outlook, and even a philosophy of architecture, one that reads why traditional buildings chose ground backed by mountains and facing water, and how villages settled their land by weighing wind, sunlight, and watercourses. Seen this way, feng shui can be called one branch of a long cultural reflection through which people of old observed nature and tended their dwelling places by leaning on its order.
Feng shui carries with it several premises that form its foundation. One is the notion of resonance between kindred energies, the idea that energies of the same kind communicate and answer to one another. In particular, ancestors and descendants were held to be the same energy linked by a single bloodline, so that placing an ancestor in a good site was thought to let that energy reach the descendants. On this premise, feng shui came to embrace, beyond a mere technique for choosing good ground, a worldview in which people, land, and ancestors are bound together by an unseen energy.
The frame by which feng shui examines a site is often summed up in four elements: the dragon, the node, the surrounding hills, and the water. The dragon is the ridge that carries energy as it flows down, the node is the spot where that energy finally settles, the surrounding hills are the nearby mountain forms that enclose and protect the spot, and the water is the watercourse that halts and harbors the energy. People of old gauged an auspicious site by examining step by step how these four elements come together, and this frame was applied widely in fixing the sites of villages and capitals as well. The choosing of Hanyang as the new capital of Joseon is likewise handed down as the result of examining a form in which mountains ring all sides and water winds around, showing how deeply feng shui reached even into the siting of a nation's capital.