What is Luo Shu？ (洛书)
It was introduced in the earlier article about what is He Tu, apart from the mystical and logical part of the stories that was introduced in the earlier article. The article was written to make you realize the formation of Early Heaven Trigram plus most importantly He Tu was the study of natural behavior rather than something mystical or superstitious.
Here is another extension of HeTu which is the Luo Shu, you might find that some Chinese Metaphysics book explain to you that Luo Shu is the application part. But seriously, as a first time reader or learner who steps into the Chinese Metaphysics world who will really know what it means?
The easier version in English, it actually means that He Tu tells you the natural phenomena of nature. How the Sun rise or set etc, and understanding of Five Elements. While Luo Shu will tell you how the numbers adds up to see the natural phenomena. That detail is the application, especially for Feng Shui, we use Luo Shu extensive to know the location of the particular sector so that we can enhance it if it’s a positive sector or similar we can bring in certain remedies base on the element of the negative sector, usually the cure we use is base of five elements cycle of exhaustion to negate the negative impact of the sector.
Like I mentioned earlier, there are variants of the mystical folklore in Luo Shu, here is one of the version that most people read before, Luo Shu was created by King Wen when he was sitting by the banks of river Luo. This is when a giant tortoise emerged from the river.
The giant tortoise has its back inscribed with circular dots of black and white markings and was arranged in a 3 by 3 nine-grid pattern square grid which was later known as magic squares.
Why magical? It is because add the number in any directions, it will add up to the number of 15which coincided with the number of days in each of the 24 phases of the solar year. This is to explain to you that Qi goes through a transition phase of Qi every 15 days. Of course in some aspects of Feng Shui this can be ignore, but in some studies especially Qimen Dun Jia, this piece of information is vital as it this Jie Qi that determines the Qimen divination chart.
Take away the five in the middle. And you realize that any number you add in any direction will become the sum of 10. This He Shi (合十) concept represents auspicious union of number, which is mostly use in San Yuan date selection process. While some of the school method varies from one another, but usually the He Shi concept is broadly accepted as an auspicious union in date selection.
The above-mentioned are only just two of the many usages of Luo Shu. This is why Luo Shu is another cornerstone in Chinese Metaphysics. To end the article, here are some of the representations in Luo Shu (Formation of Later Heaven Trigrams as well):