Dui Palace

The palace layer of a chart is the ground a matter stands on — the surroundings the person asking is in, the space they live and work in, the compass direction, and the part of the body that answers to it. Dui holds the due west and belongs to Metal. Its trigram is open at the top, the upper line broken over two solid ones, and what it takes its character from is the marsh: low ground where water gathers, and where people are glad to gather too. One end of it is delight and talk — the open mouth, the easy room, the thing said out loud. The other end is that break in the top line: a gap, a piece missing, something not quite whole. One trigram, both ends at once, and what has been asked decides which end is doing the talking.

• Places and settings: ground that dips, and ground with an opening in it — marshes, lakes and ponds, gorges, hollows, shallow ditches, wells, caves and mountain passes; the places people gather to talk and be entertained — restaurants and eating houses, concert halls, meeting halls, lecture rooms, amusement parks, skating rinks; and the broken ground of ruins, old houses, building sites and rubbish tips.
• People and affairs: the youngest daughter; and everyone who works through the mouth — lecturers and professors, public speakers, commentators, interpreters, singers, comic performers, matchmakers, service and public-relations staff; also surgeons and dentists, and people in metalwork and in food.
• Objects: vessels with a mouth (bottles and jars, wine cups, eating and drinking ware), metal with an edge or a point (knives and swords, shears), and anything broken, incomplete or waiting to be repaired.
• The body: the mouth, the tongue, the teeth and the throat, along with the lungs and the anus.

Joy and the gap are two ends of a single trigram, not a good reading and a bad one. The upper line is broken, so Dui is both the open mouth that speaks and the opening where something has gone missing. Only the matter being asked about decides which end to read.

Nature

Cheerful, open, and invested in talk. Being liked and being accepted genuinely matter to the person involved, and the emotional temperature of a room registers straight away. Heaviness and confrontation get avoided; the easy-going surface sits over a real concern about the quality of every relationship.

Style

Smooth in dealing with people, using language to close the distance, good at building a room where nothing feels like pressure. Talk comes before opposition, negotiation and compromise are the preferred route — and when the mood goes flat, this is the one who gets up and warms it again.

Strength

Communication, and a feel for emotion that carries across to other people: a complicated subject comes out of this mouth in a form others can take in. Negotiation, coordination and relationship-building are the strengths of the person involved, which suits sales, advisory work, hosting and community roles.

Impression

Warm, unfussy, with no distance to be crossed first. Face and voice both carry, and this is usually the one who ends up as the lubricant in a group. The first meeting is a pleasure; depth is the part that takes longer to establish.

Pitfall

Real opinions pushed down to keep the peace. Going along with things by degrees leaves the person involved with no position at all; feeling goes outward while nothing inside is holding it up; and the fear of not being liked makes refusal impossible. What is left after long enough is emptiness and worn-out relationships.

Read for a dwelling, the Dui cell gives two things: how the whole house presents itself when Dui energy is in season and when it has fallen out of season, and which kinds of place outside the house belong to Dui.

• When the energy is strong: carved beams and painted rafters, courtyards laid out close and complete, ranks of standing columns.
• When the energy is weak: corners missing and hollows in the plan, broken and collapsing stretches, and bad leaks.
• Outside the house, what belongs to Dui: marshland, gorges, hollows, lakes and ponds, mountain passes, caves and wells; meeting rooms, concert halls, tea houses, restaurants, skating rinks and amusement parks; and ruins and old houses.

The strong-energy and weak-energy descriptions characterise the whole building, not one room inside it, and the "places" are types of environment out of doors. At the palace layer there is still no table matching a palace to a particular room indoors.

When the indicator lands in this palace, the direction you take is West. This mapping is fixed and does not vary by matter.