The Three Gates (三要)

Door, bedroom and stove — the three features the classical sources treat as primary in a house. The three gates are the main door, the master bed and the stove. Traditional house reading concentrates on these three before anything else, on the grounds that they govern entry, rest and sustenance.

It belongs to the classical vocabulary of the tradition. Door, bedroom and stove — the three features the classical sources treat as primary in a house. The three-gate framing is the tradition's own triage: it is an explicit statement about where to spend attention first, which is unusual in a body of material that otherwise accumulates without ranking.

The classical sources give each a separate set of rules and treat the door as the most important — the building's mouth. The stove rules are the most numerous and the most clearly practical, covering position relative to water and to the door. It is grouped under Wood (木) in the five-element system.