Is 9 Star Ki Identical to The Flying Star Theory?

According to ancient Chinese legends, a giant tortoise surfaced from the River Lo in central China around 4,000 years ago. The ancients found a pattern on a tortise shell (see extreme right picture). There were circular dots of numbers that were arranged in a three by three nine grid pattern on it's shell.

The Flying Star Theory and Nine-Star Ki are identical in that both use the magic square where it is a 3 by 3 grid and every 3 squares in any direction adds up to 15.  In addition, both make use of the I-Ching (The ancient Book of Changes).

The difference between the two are that: The flying star theory is an "undiluted" form of Feng Shui analysis practised by traditional Feng Shui masters and it is used for many things e.g. looking at a home, office, good directions to travel and all the same things that are found in Nine-Star Ki.

In fact, I cannot separate the two. But Nine-Star Ki, as what I had researched is not traditionally practised by `true' Chinese Feng Shui Masters e.g. those that fled to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Phillipines, Singapore and Malaysia. (Where once it was banned by the communist China). Nine-Star Ki was `adapted' for use mainly in the West and Japan.  Otherwise, as I mentioned it is fundamentally based on the magic square as shown above.

There are pros and cons in using / understanding one or the other. The flying star theory is much harder to learn as it does not give you a package of tools unlike Nine-Star ki where, most authors have bundled concepts of personality traits, direction of travel etc.. to the Nine star ki. The flying star theory needs one to learn from the basic and more and later combine what u have learned.

For the Chinese, there are many good Feng Shui books written in Mandarin to aid them in this. For others without Feng Shui knowledge more difficult to combine all the concepts.

As for Nine-Star Ki, the only flaw (not the "product" itself) but many western books simply state the year field as 1990, 1991 and this is NOT correct especially for those born in January or February of the year. What the authors could do was to state more clearly e.g. 5 Jan 1990 to 27 Feburary 1991. So that if my birthday is really 4 Jan 1990, I should belong to 1989 instead of 1990. Well, other than this, Flying Star theory has what is known as mountain star and water star. Mountain star(s) are good e.g. where the back of the CEO is sitting.

For Authentic Feng Shui assessment, all Feng Shui masters use the Flying Star theory as the defacto standard. I have never heard anyone using Nine-Star ki unless to include a person's overall personality traits etc. Feng Shui assessment using the flying star theory is thus a MUST by FS experts.

Personally, I use the Flying Star Theory as I am already used to this `complex' model. The saying goes. old habits die hard:)