Decline stage

Meaning

The Decline is the sixth of the twelve life stages, the first after the Peak. The classics call it 衰 shuāi, “decline”, and the Ziping Zhenquan says what the word means for a phase: having reached its height it begins to turn, the first change of things. The plant has given its full growth; its colour deepens and its sap slows, as the last month of a season leads to the next.

The tradition reads experience, moderation and a calmer, steadier strength. A Day Master at its Decline in a pillar’s branch has not lost its force there; it uses it differently, with less display and more judgement, the way a seasoned hand works more surely than an eager one. The stage belongs to those who know what things cost and choose where to spend themselves.

Its difficulty is a tiredness of the summit: a habit of looking back to the Peak, a caution that can become reluctance. The tradition values what the stage brings rather than what it has left behind, the wisdom of a strength that no longer needs to prove itself.

In practice

• For each Day Master: Jia declines in Chen, Bing and Wu in Wei, Geng in Xu and Ren in Chou; Yi in Chou, Ding and Ji in Chen, Xin in Wei and Gui in Xu.
• Earth’s branches: every Decline falls in one of the four Earth branches. For a yang stem it is the month that closes its own season: Chen ends Jia’s spring, Wei Bing’s summer, Xu Geng’s autumn and Chou Ren’s winter.
• The Golden Carriage: for the yang stems the Decline branch is also the Golden Carriage, two branches on from their Prosperity: comfort and grace in the stage of seasoned strength.
• Before and after: the Decline follows the Peak and leads to the Retreat; across the wheel, in the clashing branch, stands its Nurture, the shelter of the next beginning.
• On the board and in time, the stage shows under each pillar whose branch is the Day Master’s Decline 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 sui, soe and Suy.
• In Hellenistic astrology the houses that follow the angles were called apoklimata, the “declines”, places where a planet’s strength turns away from the angle it has passed; Vettius Valens and his contemporaries read a planet there as acting less strongly: the same picture of a force past its height, drawn from the turning sky rather than from the branches.

Origin and history

The Decline belongs to the twelve stages of the Zi Ping school’s books, the Yuanhai Ziping of the Song and the San Ming Tong Hui of the Ming, which follow each phase from its Peak through three stages of withdrawal before its Storehouse. The Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, explains it in four words, the height reached and the decline begun, the first change of things, and sets it at the head of the stages in which a phase gives back what it gathered. The word itself is an ordinary one, used of a season’s end and of a dynasty’s later years alike.

How Ulune calculates it

The Decline is stage 5 of the count, five branches from the Birth: forward for a yang stem, so Jia, born in Hai, declines in Chen; backward for a yin stem, so Yi, born in Wu, declines in Chou. Earth follows Fire, Wu declining in Wei with Bing and Ji in Chen with Ding. The Golden Carriage is Ulune’s own table, two branches after each Day Master’s Prosperity star, and meets the Decline for the yang Day Masters only. The board shows the stage under each pillar whose branch it is, and the full table in the luck pillar and the year too.

Correspondences