Birth stage
In Chinese: 長生长生
The first of the twelve life stages, where a stem’s phase begins, like a seed breaking ground: a fresh start, promise, and support from where things begin.
Meaning
Birth is the first of the twelve life stages, the branch where a stem’s phase begins its course. The classics call it 長生 chángshēng, “long life”: the moment the Ziping Zhenquan likens to a person’s first days, and the readings to a seed that breaks ground. The phase is young here, not yet strong, but everything is ahead of it.
The tradition reads a fresh start, promise, and support from where things begin. A Day Master at its Birth stage in a pillar’s branch is said to find there something like a nursery: the ground that suits its growth, a place it can draw on more than it gives. For the yang stems that ground is quite literally theirs, for each is hidden in its Birth branch as a seed: Jia in Hai, Bing and Wu in Yin, Geng in Si, Ren in Shen.
Its difficulty is the young plant’s. A beginning has energy and little experience; what is born here grows best with time, patience and the stages that follow, and Ulune reads it as an invitation to start, never as a promise kept in advance.
In practice
- For each Day Master: Jia is born in Hai, Bing and Wu in Yin, Geng in Si and Ren in Shen; Yi in Wu, Ding and Ji in You, Xin in Zi and Gui in Mao. Under a pillar whose branch is one of these, the board shows the Birth stage.
- The four births: the yang stems’ Birth branches are Yin, Shen, Si and Hai, the four branches that open the seasons, which the tradition calls the places of birth; they are also the branches of the Travelling Horse. The yin stems are born in Zi, Wu, Mao and You, the four branches at the heart of the seasons.
- The trines: a yang stem’s Birth is the first branch of its phase’s three harmonies, as Hai opens Hai, Mao and Wei for Wood; its Peak and its Storehouse follow.
- Before and after: Birth follows Nurture, where the phase grew in shelter, and leads to the Bath; across the wheel, in the clashing branch, stands its Retreat.
- In time: a luck pillar or a year whose branch is the Day Master’s Birth branch brings this stage for its while; the full table shows it in the luck pillar’s row and the year’s.
Across traditions
- In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the stage is chōsei, jangsaeng and Trường Sinh. The word is the Daoists’ too: 長生, long life, is what their arts of nourishing life sought, and the name keeps that sense of a life just set going.
- In Western astrology the nearest idea is the heliacal rising, the morning a planet first reappears at dawn after the Sun has hidden it, which Babylonian and Hellenistic astrologers read as the start of its strength: a birth into visibility, read from the sky rather than from a cycle of the branches.
Origin and history
The Huainanzi, in 139 BC, already gives each phase a branch of birth: Wood is born in Hai, Fire in Yin, Metal in Si and Water in Shen, the first moments of the three harmonies. The Song and Ming books of the Zi Ping school, the Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui, make it the first of twelve and add the yin stems’ births, counted backwards. Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan explains the name as an image: chángshēng is like a person newly born, the first of the twelve borrowed words for the course of a phase. Earth has had more than one birth: the Huainanzi has it born in Wu, the Zi Ping school in Yin with Fire, some later schools in Shen with Water.
How Ulune calculates it
Ulune takes the Birth branch of each stem from the classical table, Earth following Fire: Hai for Jia, Yin for Bing and Wu, Si for Geng, Shen for Ren, Wu for Yi, You for Ding and Ji, Zi for Xin and Mao for Gui. It is stage 0 of the count: from there a yang stem goes forward one branch per stage and a yin stem backward, and the Day Master’s stage in each pillar’s branch is read from it. Every stage reading names the Day Master’s Birth branch first, whatever stage the pillar holds, and says which way it counts from there.
Correspondences
| Correspondence | Birth stage |
|---|---|
| Characters, pinyin | 長生 chángshēng (长生), “long life” |
| Place | First of the twelve stages |
| Image | The seed breaking ground |
| For each stem | Jia → Hai, Yi → Wu, Bing → Yin, Ding → You, Wu → Yin, Ji → You, Geng → Si, Xin → Zi, Ren → Shen, Gui → Mao |
| Branches | Yin, Shen, Si, Hai for the yang stems; Zi, Wu, Mao, You for the yin |
| Before | Nurture |
| After | Bath |
| Opposite | Retreat |
| In the trine | Its first branch |
| Ulune’s reading | A fresh start, promise, support from where things begin |
| Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese | Chōsei, jangsaeng, Trường Sinh |
Related
- Twelve life stagesHow strongly a stem’s phase stands in each of the twelve branches, told as a plant’s year from the seed to the harvest and back to the seed.
- Nurture stageThe last of the twelve life stages, where the new phase is nourished and grows in shelter before its birth: patience, care received, preparing what comes next.
- Bath stageThe second of the twelve life stages, the young phase washed and exposed, still unsteady: curiosity, charm, a taste for trying things, at times restlessness.
- Retreat stageThe seventh of the twelve life stages, where a phase draws back like sap at the turn of autumn: sensitivity, thoughtfulness, an eye for what others miss.
- Day MasterThe Heavenly Stem of the day of birth, the self in BaZi: the character every other stem and branch of a chart is read against, as one of the Ten Gods.
- TrineThree branches four places apart, a phase’s birth, peak and storehouse, making that phase together: the zodiac’s allies, a triangle on the wheel.
- Hidden stemsThe one to three Heavenly Stems each Earthly Branch holds inside it, a main one and its companions: what a branch is made of, as BaZi reads it.
Sources
- Liu An (ed.), Huainanzi, “Patterns of Heaven” (Tianwen), 139 BC
- Xu Sheng (ed.), Yuanhai Ziping, Song dynasty
- Wan Minying, San Ming Tong Hui, 16th century
- Shen Xiaozhan, Ziping Zhenquan, 18th century
- Ho Peng Yoke, Chinese Mathematical Astrology, 2003