Crown stage

Meaning

The Crown is the third of the twelve life stages, after the Bath. The classics call it 冠帶 guàndài, “cap and belt”: the cap a young man received at his coming of age and the belt of adult dress. In the Ziping Zhenquan’s words the phase’s form and strength are growing, as a person grows up and puts on cap and belt. The shoot has become a young plant; it is not yet at work, but it is ready to be.

The tradition reads growing confidence, the wish to be seen and to learn the ways of the world. The stage is a threshold: what was tried at the Bath becomes a manner, a style, a first sense of one’s place. A Day Master at its Crown stage in a pillar’s branch is read as gathering assurance there, keen to show what it can do and to learn the rules of the game before it takes up its office.

Its difficulty is the newcomer’s: confidence ahead of experience, care for appearances, a wish for recognition that can run before the work. The tradition values what lets the young phase grow into its cap, patience, a teacher, a first real task.

In practice

• For each Day Master: Jia is at its Crown stage in Chou, Bing and Wu in Chen, Geng in Wei and Ren in Xu; Yi in Chen, Ding and Ji in Wei, Xin in Xu and Gui in Chou.
• Earth’s branches: every Crown falls in one of the four Earth branches, Chen, Wei, Xu and Chou, which close the seasons. For a yang stem it is the last month before its own season: Jia comes of age in Chou, at the end of winter, and takes office in Yin, at Lichun; Geng in Wei, at the end of summer, before its autumn.
• Before and after: the Crown follows the Bath and leads to Prosperity; across the wheel, in the clashing branch, stands its Storehouse, the gathering-in that answers the first display.
• On the board and in time, the stage shows under each pillar whose branch is the Day Master’s Crown branch, and in the full table in the row of a luck pillar or a year that brings it.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the stage is kantai, gwandae and Quan Đới.
• In the Chinese rites the image is the capping, 冠禮 guànlǐ, which the Book of Rites calls the beginning of all the rites: at twenty a young man of good family received his cap and a courtesy name, and was counted an adult.
• In Western astrology the coming of age is often read in the first Saturn return, near the age of 29, when a person is said to take on the responsibilities of an adult: the same threshold, timed by a planet rather than placed in a branch.

Origin and history

The capping ceremony is described in the ritual classics of the Zhou and Han, the Yili and the Book of Rites, whose chapter on its meaning makes it the start of adult conduct. The Zi Ping school’s books of the Song and Ming dynasties, the Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui, borrowed its name for the third of the twelve stages, between the Bath and the taking of office. Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, keeps the image and says what it means for a phase: its form and its qi grow stronger, as a person comes of age.

How Ulune calculates it

The Crown is stage 2 of the count, two branches from the Birth: forward for a yang stem, so Jia, born in Hai, comes of age in Chou; backward for a yin stem, so Yi, born in Wu, comes of age in Chen. Earth follows Fire, Wu sharing Bing’s Crown in Chen and Ji Ding’s in Wei. Ulune shows it on the board under each pillar whose branch it is, with its reading and the reason, and in the full table, for the four pillars and for the luck pillar and the year running now.

Correspondences