ABSTRACT
This chapter intends to illuminate the mutual relationship between the environment and those who experience it, first by looking at experiments conducted by psychologists on this topic, and then through the example of a Fengshui master in the fifteenth century. It examines how he planned a village through the storytelling process. The environment he created through the confabulation of a wonderful story has since sustained many generations of village residents. Ox, the treasure of a farmer. With great diligence yet without a helpful ox, the farmer toils in the fieldsearly in the morning in vain. One ox is half of the family. Fengshui, literally translated as “wind and water,” is probably the longest-living tradition of environmental planning. Visualizing the site as an ox was a mysterious fabrication by the geomancer. The ox played an essential role for farming families in the harvesting of crops in traditional Chinese agrarian society, and thus was greatly venerated.
