Shen Jiu's Compass

Shen Jiu's Compass

At the south end of the old town runs a lane of locust trees. At its far end stands a low tiled house whose door bears a faded cloth banner marked with a single character: Shen. The neighbors say Master Shen's compass does not measure the veins of the earth but the hearts of men.

Shen Jiu's given name was Shen Shouzhuo. In his youth he worked as a clerk in an apothecary, and with the savings he learned geomancy for three years under a wandering master. When the master left, Shen set up his own sign and took to siting houses and graves. Yet he had a strange habit: the compass lay on his table, but he never truly turned its needle. When a client gave him a birth date, he first asked three things, which way the stove mouth faced, whether the threshold had cracked, what sound was heard at night. Then he closed his eyes a moment and spoke, and was right seven or eight times out of ten.

The Zhao family, who kept the rice shop east of town, would not believe it. Two years running they had lost hired hands, and suspecting some disturbance in the dwelling, they sent for Shen. He stood in the courtyard for the length of a meal. He noted the ring of green moss that always wet the foot of the water vat, the three dusty coffin planks leaned against the back wall, and last he fixed on the thick callus at the base of Zhao's thumb. "Boss Zhao," he said, "how many years have you been mixing sand into your rice?" Zhao went white. Shen shook his head. "What you have lost is not your hired hands but your own conscience. Take the sand out, and that will answer better than any master."

The saying spread, and Shen's name grew louder, and so did his enemies. A southern squire nicknamed the Living Yama wished to seize a stretch of wasteland by the river for a family tomb; the land was the vegetable garden of a dozen tenant farmers. The squire brought silver and asked Shen to write a certificate praising the site as a fortune-bringing grave. Shen returned the silver intact. "This ground is the living's livelihood, not the dead's bed," he said. "Raise your tomb and the living lose their living first. That is the disturbance you should fear, and it falls on you." The squire, shamed to fury, threatened to smash his sign. Shen did not flinch. That night he took in the banner and hung the compass on the lintel, and from then on he read only the living feng shui. He told a leaking roof where to mend the tiles, urged brothers at odds to divide the estate, and would site no dragon's lair for anyone.

Someone asked whether the compass truly worked. Shen laughed. "The compass is dead; man is alive. Plant a locust before your door: shade in summer, windbreak in winter, that is good feng shui. What need have I to turn a needle?"

Years later most of the lane was torn down, yet Shen's tiled house stood on. The neighbors said it was not that they could not bear to pull it down, but that without it they would not know which way was north.