During one of the tomb visits on the recent China Excursion, one student quipped that the tombstone did not have a ‘dragon neck’.

Say what? Some of us stopped dead in our tracks. Did we miss some Feng Shui secret?

“You know,” she said. “The part where the tombstone is connected to the ground via a tunnel of soil...?” She was dead serious so no one laughed. After further cross-examination, she revealed that her previous (and first) exposure to Yin House Feng Shui was somewhat peculiar – a small brick passageway was made right behind the tombstone to the ground, so that the ‘Qi can travel up to the stone’.

I thought the Qi was received by the bones and DNA of the body? Never realized that the stone was supposed to be the recipient of good Feng Shui…

Thankfully, after more Yin House visits all over China later – and seeing that there was no such thing as a ‘dragon neck’ for the tombstone – our dear confused friend was convinced. In fact, older Yin House Feng Shui is done without the tombstone. After all, the point of Feng Shui is to locate a spot which gathers Qi and to use it. In this case, ‘using it’ would mean burial.

The Devil Made Me Do It
Yin House Feng Shui is just another topic that is subjected to a great deal of deliberate misinformation and abuse. Every other person tries to appear mysterious and quirky – which innocent students mistakenly equate to being learned. We hear things like ‘offering rice to the Luo Pan’ after a Yin House consultation because the Luo Pan is a mystical object, although the last any respectable Feng Shui practitioner has heard, Luo Pans are magnetic compasses, made mainly in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Unless you haven’t seen a magnet in your life, a compass would hardly appear as ‘magical’.

One may be tempted to argue that perhaps such spectacular practice belong to the ‘secret knowledge of certain lineage-holders’… but I bid you hold your horses: first of all, no classical text has ever mentioned or even hinted at burial techniques such as ‘building a dragon neck’. In fact, the ‘dragon neck’ refers specifically to the land formation that connects the main dragon to the star form. It’s not something one can reconstruct.

Secondly, no Yin House tomb – successful ones at least – all over the history of China has ever been seen with such a thing! So how come now? Even Grandmaster Yang Yun Song’s own tomb is unmarked – and his good name and work still live on till today; Huang Tai Ji’s founding of the Qing dynasty began with an accidental ancestral burial at the foot of an elm tree, tapping into a ‘Reverse Dragon Overlooking Ancestors’ superior formation.

In fact, there is nothing too extraordinary when it comes to Yin House Feng Shui. If you know your San He landforms fundamentals well, you can do Yin House OR Yang House. However, Flying Stars and Eight Mansions would not suffice. Clearly because those are internal Feng Shui formulas – how do you demarcate the 9 Palace grid inside a tomb? So now if you hear something like ‘using the coffin to tap the double 8 stars’… you know better now.

Aiming For the Neck
In today’s Feng Shui arena, everyone strives to come up with something new. While it is a commendable effort, we should try not to stretch classical principles too thin. Or the novelty wears off. It becomes laughable.

Standing at the actual neck of a dragon (read: mountain range) is truly a humbling/exhilarating experience for every Feng Shui student. Imagine this: you are way up high above ground-level and it’s very windy – but when you find the slight dip of the neck – the winds stops. Because good quality dragon necks are protected by natural mountain formations at the sides, and as such, wind does not hit it.

Why this is so important is because the ‘neck’ connects all the Qi of the main dragon ranges and channels it to the star form where the Qi is released to the vicinity. Left unprotected (the case of inferior dragon ranges), being exposed to the winds means that the quality of Qi is diminished.

And again, I refer to the neck of the actual dragon…