Coincidentally, I saw an object today at a friend's house, that was
describes as a "Feng Shui meter". It was Chinese-made, brought from some
remote provinces of China as a souvenir by a traveling academic. It
consists of a circular piece of wood with a goldleaf paper sticker on
the pack and a compass and a metal sticker on the front. There are
several rings with writing on the front plate (which I obviously cannot
translate, not being versed in the language). The innermost ring
contains 8 patterns of dots and segments. The second ring is a
collection of 8 I-Ching symbols. After about thirty seconds of staring
at the object, I realized that the dot-and-segment patterns were very
similar to the ones in a magic square. Actually, the first observation I
made was that the number of dots ranged from 1 to 9 with 5 missing, and
this led to a comparison to a magic square. the 1 segment was aligned
with 0 or N on the compass. Reading from there, the 1 and the two
adjacent segments form the top row of a magic square, with three
segments adjacent to 180 or S forming the bottom row. The compass itself
must be considered to be 5 for all this to make sense.
Has anyone observed similar patterns elsewhere? I am not sure what the
exact connection to Feng Shui is, but can anyone elaborate on the
historical significance of this construct--I am sure it is not a modern
invention ? (Even though the object cannot be more than 5 years old--it
seems to have been made for local consumption.)
VS-)