Twelve life stages

Meaning

The twelve life stages follow a stem’s phase round the twelve Earthly Branches and say how strongly it stands in each: where it begins, where it comes into its own and where it is at its fullest, where it softens, rests and is stored away, and where a new cycle is conceived and nourished before it begins again. In a chart BaZi reads them for the Day Master, in the branch of each pillar: one more way of seeing how much ground the self has in each part of the chart.

The classics name the twelve after a human life, from birth to the grave and back to the womb, and the Ziping Zhenquan says plainly that the names are borrowed images: what they describe is a phase’s strength, the way a plant’s year describes a season. Read so, the cycle is a farmer’s year. The seed breaks ground (Birth), the young shoot is washed by the rain (Bath), it comes of age (Crown), takes up its work (Prosperity) and stands at full growth (Peak); then it softens (Decline), draws back like sap in autumn (Retreat), comes to rest after the harvest (Rest), is gathered into the granary (Storehouse) and waits between one year and the next (Pause), until it is conceived again as a seed (Conception) and nourished in the ground (Nurture) for its next spring.

Four of the classical names speak of illness and death, which Ulune never predicts. It calls those stages Retreat, Rest, Storehouse and Pause, the seasons’ words their own readings already used, and keeps the classical names, with their characters and pinyin, in each stage’s reading and on its page. No stage is better than another: each describes how strong a phase is in one place, never what will happen there, and nothing about health. The Peak can overreach, the Rest sees to the heart of things, and the Pause is where a new cycle becomes possible.

In practice

• On the board, under each pillar’s column, Ulune gives the Day Master’s stage in that pillar’s branch. Its reading says why, from the branch where the Day Master is born and the way it goes round, and names the classical stage where Ulune’s word differs.
• Forward and backward: the five yang stems go forward round the branches from their Birth, the five yin stems backward, so that a yin stem is born where its yang twin comes to rest: Yi in Wu, where Jia rests, Ding and Ji in You, Xin in Zi and Gui in Mao.
• With the other signs: the Prosperity stage is the branch of the Prosperity star and, in the month, of the Prosperity structure; a yang stem’s Peak is its Sword Edge; and the Birth, the Peak and the Storehouse of a yang stem are the three harmonies of its phase, Hai, Mao and Wei for Wood.
• In the tables, the full table gives the stage in every pillar and in the luck pillar and the year running now; the pages of the sixty pillars give the stage each stem holds in its own branch, as Jia at its Bath stage in Jia Zi.
• Beside the strength: Ulune’s three tests of the Day Master’s strength count its roots by the hidden stems, not by the stages; the stages are read beside them, as a nuance of each branch.

Across traditions

• In Japan the twelve are the jūni-un (十二運) of Shichū Suimei, where 臨官 is usually called kenroku; Korea’s saju calls them sibi unseong. Vietnam knows them as the Trường Sinh ring, which Tử Vi, its Zi Wei Dou Shu, also lays round the twelve palaces of a chart.
• In Western astrology a planet’s strength by place is read through its dignities, the domicile and the exaltation where it is at home or honoured, the detriment and the fall where it works less easily: the same idea of strength by position, drawn from the signs rather than from a cycle of growth.
• In India, jyotiṣa gives a planet an age by its degree in a sign, from infancy to old age, the bālādi avasthā: another way of reading a cycle of life as a measure of strength.

Origin and history

The idea is older than BaZi. The Huainanzi, in 139 BC, says that Wood is born in Hai, matures in Mao and comes to its end in Wei, that Fire is born in Yin, matures in Wu and ends in Xu, and the same of each phase: the three moments that became the three harmonies, and that the twelve stages fill out branch by branch. The Song and Ming books of the Zi Ping school, the Yuanhai Ziping first and Wan Minying’s San Ming Tong Hui after it, set the twelve out as a table for the ten stems, the yang stems going forward and the yin stems backward.

Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, explains both choices. Yang gathers and advances and yin disperses and retreats, so the one goes forward and the other back; and the names, from “long life” to “nourishing”, are borrowed to describe a growth, the seed’s husk washed away at the Bath, the cap and belt of coming of age, the office taken up, the storehouse where nature gathers in what it has made, until the next qi takes over from the last. The yin stems’ backward count has always had its critics: some teachers read the stages for the yang stems alone, or let each yin stem follow its yang twin, and the Di Tian Sui, with Ren Tieqiao’s commentary, weighs a stem by its roots in the whole chart rather than by its stage in one branch.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune starts from the branch where each stem is born: 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. Earth follows Fire, as the Zi Ping school counts it, so Wu shares Bing’s stages and Ji shares Ding’s; other schools let Earth follow Water. From its Birth a yang stem counts forward round the twelve branches and a yin stem backward, one stage to a branch: Jia is born in Hai, bathed in Zi, crowned in Chou, takes office in Yin, peaks in Mao and is stored in Wei, while Yi, born in Wu and bathed in Si, peaks in Yin. The board shows the Day Master’s stage in each pillar’s branch, and the full table in the branches of the luck pillar and the year running now too. The words are Ulune’s for four of the twelve and the classics’ for the other eight.

Correspondences