220
MAURICE FREEDMAN
putting the point. In the traditional Chinese view man stands in a relationship to Heaven and Earth which links him with both and causes him to stand with them as one of the three primary powers of the cosmos. The conception is as old as Chinese metaphysics and is basic to a classical work, the Book of Changes, which is cited as an authority by geomancers of the present day. True, much of what is to be heard and seen in the New Territories under the name of fung shui cannot be explained from the classical works; we are dealing here with popular religion, not an expression of canonical purity; but just as the Bible supplies conceptions to modern Christians who are not very familiar with it, so ancient Chinese thought lives on in some of the ideas of contemporary Chinese peasants.
50. Again in a Western idiom, we may say that fung shui is the craft of adapting the abodes of men (graves and buildings) to the landscape. But while it may be perfectly true that geomancy has produced in the Chinese a sharpened aesthetic appreciation of their natural surroundings and led to a superb technique of landscaping, it is not in fact the physical landscape which is directly in question in fung shui. I have heard people in the New Territories commenting enthusiastically on the prospects from geomantically favourable sites; but their appreciation is grounded in their feeling for the virtues flowing from the harmony between the site, its owners, and the segment of the universe within which it is placed. Man is involved in his surroundings; in some places he feels at ease and at peace (shue fuk, he is content), the properties of the setting having an immediate effect on him and his fortunes. And it is for this reason that English-speaking Chinese will often say that fung shui is ‘psychological'. They do not mean, as one might superficially conclude, that geomancy is an illusion, a figment of the imagination; what they are asserting is that a man's mind is responding to a mysterious field of forces set up in a given place. He need not know very much about the details of fung shui as a craft or body of esoteric science; it is enough to be conscious of the few hints contained in the landscape—a stretch of still water, embracing hills—that he is being soothed and protected. 'You', living or dead, ‘are content'. That is the heart of the matter.
L
51. Fung shui: Winds and Waters. The Breaths (hei) which constitute the virtue of a site are blown about by the wind and held by the water. If the wind is high the Breaths will disperse; if the