EsoteriaA library of sacred & hidden knowledge
Liber XXXI · Taoism & Chinese Religion

Liber XXXI · Taoism & Chinese Religion · Chapter IV: Feng Shui

Guo Pu and the Book of Burial: The Classic Source of Feng Shui

Guo Pu (276–324), poet, scholar and diviner, and the Book of Burial (Zangshu) attributed to him: living qi, wind and water, the four animals and its date.

8 min read 1,754 words Updated

Guo Pu (276–324) was a scholar, poet and celebrated diviner of the Jin dynasty, and the Book of Burial (Zangshu) attributed to him is the classic text of Chinese geomancy, containing the passage from which the term feng shui, "wind and water", is traditionally derived. Most historians think the Book of Burial in its present form was compiled centuries after Guo Pu's death, but his reputation made him the patron and founding ancestor of the art of siting graves and houses.

Guo Pu's Life: Scholar, Poet and Diviner§

Guo Pu, whose courtesy name was Jingchun, came from Wenxi in Hedong, in modern Shanxi. He lived through the collapse of the Western Jin dynasty in the early fourth century, when invasions from the north drove much of the Chinese elite south of the Yangzi. Guo Pu joined the migration and found a place in the new Eastern Jin court at Jiankang (modern Nanjing), where he served the powerful minister Wang Dao and held posts as a secretary and writer.

He was one of the most learned men of his age. He wrote commentaries on the ancient dictionary Erya, on the dialect glossary Fangyan, on the Account of Mu, Son of Heaven and, most influentially, on the Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing), whose strange creatures and distant lands, including the Queen Mother of the West, he explained and defended as real. His commentaries are still printed with these texts.

As a poet he is remembered for his "Poems on Wandering Immortals" (Youxian shi), which describe escape from the world into the realms of the Taoist immortals, and for his long "Rhapsody on the Yangzi River" (Jiang fu), preserved in the sixth-century anthology Selections of Refined Literature.

Divination Stories in the History of the Jin§

Guo Pu's biography in the official History of the Jin (Jin shu), compiled in the seventh century, presents him above all as a master diviner. It says that he received from a teacher a set of nine books in a blue bag, covering the five phases, astronomy and divination, which a disciple later stole and lost in a fire before he could study them.

The biography relates many predictions: Guo Pu foresaw disasters, identified strange creatures, and used milfoil, the Book of Changes and other methods to advise generals and officials. One story concerns his own mother's grave. He chose a site only about a hundred paces from a river, and people warned that it would flood. Guo Pu replied that the spot would soon become dry land; later, sand built up along the bank until the area around the grave became fields of mulberry trees. The tale shows that by the seventh century he was already seen as a master of reading the land for burial.

His end was also told as a story of prophecy. In 324 the general Wang Dun, a relative of Wang Dao, prepared to rebel against the Jin throne and asked Guo Pu to divine the outcome. Guo Pu predicted failure and told Wang Dun that if he rose up he would soon die. The enraged general had him executed. Wang Dun's rebellion indeed collapsed and he died the same year. The court later honoured Guo Pu, and Taoist hagiography claimed that he had not really died but achieved "release from the corpse" as an immortal.

The Book of Burial: Authorship and Dating§

The Book of Burial (Zangshu, also called Zang jing, the "Burial Classic") presents itself as Guo Pu's teaching. No such work, however, is listed in the early bibliographies of the Sui and Tang dynasties; it first appears in catalogues of the Song period. Its language and concepts also fit Tang and Song geomantic literature better than the fourth century.

For these reasons most modern historians regard it as a compilation of the Tang or Song dynasties attributed to Guo Pu because of his fame as a diviner and expert on graves. It may contain earlier material, and the attribution reflects a real tradition that associated him with burial siting from at least the seventh century.

The text circulated in versions of different lengths. In the Yuan dynasty the scholar Wu Cheng (1249–1333) edited it into inner, outer and miscellaneous sections, discarding passages he judged to be later additions. In the eighteenth century the editors of the imperial Complete Library of the Four Treasuries included it, noting the doubts about its authorship.

Riding the Living Qi: Teachings of the Book of Burial§

The book opens with a principle: burial means "riding on the living qi" (sheng qi). Qi, the vital energy of the cosmos discussed in the article on yin and yang and the five phases, was believed to flow through the earth along the contours of mountains, much as it flows through the channels of the body. When the bones of the dead are placed where this energy gathers, they receive its vitality, and through the bond between ancestors and descendants the benefit passes to the living family.

The text illustrates this resonance with an old story: when a copper mountain collapsed in the west, a bronze bell in the palace far to the east rang of its own accord. In the same way, the bones of ancestors respond to the qi of the earth, and the fortunes of descendants respond to the bones.

The passage that gave the art its name follows. In paraphrase: qi rides on the wind and is scattered, but it is halted when it meets water; the ancients gathered it so that it would not disperse and guided it so that it would come to rest, and therefore the art was called feng shui, "wind and water". A good site is one sheltered from wind that scatters qi, and bounded by water that retains it.

These ideas made burial a central concern of ancestor veneration. Families might delay a burial for years while searching for a suitable site, or rebury bones to improve their fortune, practices that later Confucian moralists criticised as selfish and superstitious.

The Four Animals and the Shape of the Land§

The Book of Burial describes the ideal site in terms of the four directional animals of Chinese cosmology. Behind the grave should rise the Dark Warrior (Xuanwu), the tortoise-and-snake of the north, imagined as a hill that "lowers its head"; in front, the Vermilion Bird should "soar and dance" as an open space or lower hill; on the left the Azure Dragon should coil sinuously, and on the right the White Tiger should crouch tamely. The result is the familiar armchair-shaped landscape in which a grave or house is embraced by hills on three sides and open toward water in front.

The text also warns against unsuitable mountains: those that are bare of vegetation, broken, rocky, passing through without halting, or isolated. In such places qi cannot gather, and burial there would bring misfortune.

This attention to landforms became the basis of the "Form School" of feng shui, associated with Jiangxi and with the Tang master Yang Yunsong, as described in the history of feng shui. The "Compass School", which relies on directions measured with the luopan, developed alongside it, and practitioners usually combined both.

Guo Pu as Patron of Geomancy§

Whatever the true date of the Book of Burial, Guo Pu became the acknowledged ancestor of the art. Geomancers across China, and later in Korea, Vietnam and Japan, cited the Book of Burial as their classic and revered Guo Pu as their founder. Shrines and reputed tombs of Guo Pu exist in several places in southern China, including an island site on the Yangzi near Zhenjiang associated by local tradition with his grave.

Western observers encountered his legacy in the nineteenth century. The missionary Ernest Eitel published a short study of feng shui in 1873, and the Dutch sinologist J. J. M. de Groot devoted much of a volume of The Religious System of China to graves and geomancy, describing practices that still followed the principles of the Book of Burial. Modern anthropologists, among them Ole Bruun, have studied how these ideas persist in village life and in tension with state campaigns against superstition.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Guo Pu?§

Guo Pu (276–324) was a scholar, poet and diviner of the Jin dynasty, known for his commentaries on ancient texts such as the Classic of Mountains and Seas, his poems on wandering immortals, and many stories of accurate prediction. He was executed by the rebel Wang Dun after foretelling the failure of his revolt.

What is the Book of Burial?§

The Book of Burial (Zangshu) is the classic text of Chinese geomancy, teaching that the dead should be buried where the living qi of the earth gathers, so that their descendants prosper. It contains the passage from which the name feng shui is traditionally derived.

Did Guo Pu really write the Book of Burial?§

Probably not in its present form. The book is not recorded in early bibliographies and first appears in Song catalogues, so most scholars date it to the Tang or Song and see the attribution to Guo Pu as a sign of his reputation as a master of burial siting.

Where does the term feng shui come from?§

It is traditionally traced to a passage in the Book of Burial saying that qi is scattered by wind and held by water, so that the art of gathering it is called "wind and water". An older name for geomancy is kanyu, "canopy and carriage", meaning heaven and earth.

Sources and further reading§