For much of its history, the theory and practice of fengshui have remained outside the purview of academia. As a result, most of its texts have not acquired the multiple layers of commentary over the centuries as have the classics of philosophy, history, and literature. Michael John Paton's endeavor to provide the English-speaking world with a sampling of these works is therefore commendable. Five Classics of Fengshui is the merging of the author's undergraduate honors thesis (1986) and his PhD dissertation (1995), thus representing a lifetime of work on the subject. Appearing in this volume are translations of five texts: the Archetypal Burial Classic of Qing Wu, purportedly from the Han dynasty, but likely a forged work or reconstituted from the following text; the Book of Burial Rooted in Antiquity, a Jin dynasty manual of grave siting; the Yellow Emperor's Classic of House Siting, a Liu Song dynasty manual of residential siting; the Twenty-Four Difficult Problems, a late Song to early Ming practitioner's guide of Form School fengshui; and the Secretly Passed Down Water Dragon Classic, a Ming dynasty illustrated manual of watercourse fengshui; as well as six informative chapters that anchor the texts in the history of science.

In chapter 1, Paton shares his reasons for conducting this study of fengshui: to answer the call for more research on the subject by Joseph Needham, whose monumental Science and Civilisation in China begrudgingly acknowledged its contribution to Chinese culture (and also to answer Needham's charge that it was a “grossly superstitious system”) and to “form the beginnings of a comprehensive body of work on the Form School of fengshui” (p. 4). Chapter 2 outlines the history of fengshui, followed by a short summary of Western studies, and concludes with a discussion of “modern ideas on the validity of fengshui” in the fields of architecture, geography, cartography, geology, and ecology (p. 11). Chapter 3 provides a brief discussion of technical terminology utilized in the book, including explanations for Paton's unorthodox translations of “spiritual geography” for fengshui; “node” for xue 穴, the ideal burial site, normally translated as “lair”; and “configurational force” for shi 勢, rendered by Kohut—the first English translator of the Burial Book—as “topography” (p. 60). Chapter 4 explains the rationale for the choice of texts under translation, whose contents exhibit both a “linear evolution”—from the siting of tombs in mountains to the siting of homes on plains and riparian zones, and a “circular evolution”—from empirical observation, to cosmological correlation, to metaphorical representation, then back to observation (p. 75). Chapter 5 reports how the traditional concepts of “lines of qi” and “mountain veins” have been compared to the effect of magnetic and gravitational fields, which Paton maintains is “tenuous” (p. 87). Chapter 6 concludes that the conceptual basis of fengshui is aesthetic, since “any suitable situation for the siting of either graves or houses must have a positive aesthetic feeling” (p. 102). This allows Paton to compare fengshui to cognitive science, which holds that “emotions are crucial to reasoning and rationality” (p. 104).

Paton's attempt to open the field of fengshui to scholarly scrutiny is largely successful. The Book of Burial is the progenitor of Form School fengshui, while the Yellow Emperor's Classic is the earliest text outlining theories of the cosmological school, the precursor of Compass School fengshui. Paton has therefore introduced the seminal texts of both schools in the opening chapters of his translation. The book continues, however, only with translations of Form School texts. Instead of overwhelming the reader with the translation of the Water Dragon Classic—which occupies almost half the length of the book—it would seem more logical to have translated a major middle-era text of the Compass School. Conversely, since the Form School is generally recognized as being founded by Yang Yunsong in the Tang dynasty, it is unfortunate that Yang's most important work, the Hanlong jing (Rousing dragon classic) was not translated. Paton readily admits this shortcoming in his preface (p. xvi).

The translation is admirable, although the nonspecialist will crave more explanation of obscure references in the texts. Even the Burial Classic, which can almost stand alone because of its remarkable clarity, utilizes terms that receive no elucidation in Paton's notes. For example, the term zhi 支—which refers to the arterial “branches” that define the flow of qi in the ground—is neither annotated in the glossary nor cited in the index, even though “the method of discerning branches” is the key to determining good fortune. It may be that Paton misconstrues the importance of zhi, which he understands as a topographical formation rather than the “obscure and portentous” mystery perceived by the author of the Book of Burial (p. 127). However, the branches likely represent the system of topographical forms that evidence the flow of qi, similar to the meridians of acupuncture. Considering that Paton specifically references “lines of qi” in his chapter on geodetic force (p. 80), it is unfortunate that he does not delve deeper into the function of zhi as appearing in his texts. But this is a minor shortcoming in his analysis, as the wealth of detail that Five Classics of Fengshui exposes to the English-speaking world will satisfy all but the most discriminating of critics.