Reference and Tools is the lookup shelf of the knowledge base: the pages you come back to when you already know the theory and only need one value, one name or one table. It is deliberately different in kind from the article sections — nothing here teaches a method from the beginning, and everything here is meant to be consulted in a few seconds and then left.

The glossary

The glossary gathers the working vocabulary of Chinese metaphysics: each term with the characters it is written in, its pinyin, the literal meaning, one plain sentence of explanation, and a pointer to the article where it is treated properly. It exists so that a word means the same thing in every article in the base.

The tables and charts

The reference tables are the data a reading is impossible without: the Lo Shu square, the He Tu pairs, all twenty-four mountains of the compass with their degrees, the eight directions of each Kua number, and the correspondences of the Five Elements at a glance. These are the numbers the articles draw on and that a practitioner checks rather than remembers.

The tools they serve

The section also explains what each Baguame tool actually computes — the Kua number, the Ba Zi chart, the Flying Stars chart, the Ba Zhai directions and the interactive Bagua map — what inputs each one needs, which school it follows, and how to read the result without misreading it.

Finally there is the material that surrounds the subject rather than sitting inside it: answers to the questions beginners ask most often, guidance on what to look for in a professional consultant and what to expect from a reading, and a guide to the classical sources themselves — the Book of Burial, the Qing Nang Jing, the Di Li Bian Zheng and the other texts from which the various schools descend.