Southwest

Southwest, a bearing of 225 degrees, holds the trigram Kun, the receptive, earth, the pure yin principle, in the Later Heaven arrangement, and it is associated in Chinese practice with the mother, with nourishment and with yielding strength. In Hindu Vastu the southwest is Nairitya, and it is the quarter given the greatest weight and mass in a building: the master bedroom, the heaviest walls and the highest point of the structure are placed there, and it is kept closed rather than open, the exact inverse of the treatment of the northeast. The two rules together produce the characteristic Vastu building that is heavy and high to the southwest and light and open to the northeast, sloping down toward the northeast corner. Whatever one makes of the cosmology, the resulting form is a coherent architectural discipline with its own logic.

In Hindu Vastu Shastra, the dikpala of the southwest is Nirṛti, a goddess or, in some texts, a rakshasa associated with destruction, decay and misfortune, and the quarter is treated as the least auspicious of the eight, generally reserved for storage, heavy furniture or the master bedroom under the reasoning that its stabilising weight anchors the household against the direction's own instability, but avoided for entrances or for the kitchen. In Chinese Bagua cosmology, the corresponding trigram is Kun, the Earth, carrying the Earth phase and associated in Feng Shui applied to interior space with relationships and marriage, a considerably more favourable reading than Vastu's own treatment of the same quarter, illustrating again how little directional symbolism transfers between unrelated traditions.

The southwest is the heavy corner in Vastu Shastra. Its dikpala is Nirriti, associated with dissolution and disorder, and the tradition responds not by avoiding the quarter but by loading it: the ground is kept highest there, the walls thickest, the heaviest storage and the master bedroom placed in that corner, so that the mass of the building sits over the direction from which decay is expected. It is the exact structural opposite of the treatment given to the light, open, watery northeast, and the two prescriptions only make sense as a pair.

Japanese practice again reaches a comparable conclusion by another route. If the northeast is the kimon, the demon gate, the southwest is the urakimon, the back demon gate, the point directly opposite through which what entered may leave. In the twelve-branch naming of the horizon it is hitsujisaru, the sheep-monkey direction. Household siting rules treat the two diagonals as a single axis to be managed rather than as two separate problems.

The Chinese Later Heaven arrangement places the trigram Kun, the receptive earth, in the southwest, and in that scheme the quarter carries none of the menace the other two systems attach to it. Kun is the mother, patient and sustaining.

Three systems, one bearing, and three incompatible readings: the quarter to weigh down, the quarter to guard, and the quarter of the nourishing earth.