Nurture stage

Meaning

Nurture is the last of the twelve life stages, after Conception and just before Birth. The new phase is nourished here and grows in shelter, the way a seed swells in the soil before it breaks ground. The classics call the stage 養 yǎng, “nourishing”, and the Ziping Zhenquan likens it to a child nourished in its mother’s womb; with it the cycle closes and turns back to its beginning.

The tradition reads patience, care received and the preparing of what comes next. A Day Master at its Nurture stage in a pillar’s branch is read as gathering strength there under someone’s care or within a sheltering frame: learning, being helped, getting ready. It is the stage of the apprentice and of the long preparation, of the work done before anyone sees it.

Its difficulty is the shelter that lasts too long, a comfort that delays the first step, or a dependence that forgets it was meant to end. The tradition values what nourishes without holding back, and the moment, one branch further, when the phase is born again.

In practice

• For each Day Master: Jia is nurtured in Xu, Bing and Wu in Chou, Geng in Chen and Ren in Wei; Yi in Wei, Ding and Ji in Xu, Xin in Chou and Gui in Chen.
• Earth’s branches: every Nurture falls in one of the four Earth branches. For a yang stem it is the month just before its Birth: Jia is nourished in Xu, at the end of autumn, and born in Hai, as winter begins; Bing in Chou, at the end of winter, before its Birth in Yin at Lichun.
• Before and after: Nurture follows Conception and leads to Birth, closing the circle; across the wheel, in the clashing branch, stands its Decline, the seasoned strength opposite the strength still forming.
• On the board and in time, the stage shows under each pillar whose branch is the Day Master’s Nurture 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 yō, yang and Dưỡng.
• In Chinese thought 養 is the word of every art of tending: Mencius said he was good at nourishing his flood-like qi, and the arts of nourishing life, 養生 yǎngshēng, still name the care of body and mind in daily Chinese. The stage takes its name from that patient care.
• In botany, many seeds will not sprout until they have spent a season in the cold ground, the stratification gardeners imitate in a refrigerator: the same lesson, that a beginning needs its time of shelter, told by plants rather than by the branches.

Origin and history

Nurture is the last of the twelve stages the Zi Ping school set out for the ten stems in the Yuanhai Ziping of the Song and the San Ming Tong Hui of the Ming. The Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, gives it the image of the child in the womb and ends its account of the twelve there, saying that from Nurture the course returns to Birth and goes round without end. The word itself is far older: Mencius, in the 4th century BC, made the nourishing of qi a lifelong practice, and the stage’s name carries that sense of growth by patient care.

How Ulune calculates it

Nurture is stage 11 of the count, the branch just before the Birth: for a yang stem, which counts forward, the branch before its Birth branch, so Jia, born in Hai, is nurtured in Xu; for a yin stem, which counts backward, the branch after it, so Yi, born in Wu, is nurtured in Wei. Earth follows Fire, Wu nurtured in Chou with Bing and Ji in Xu with Ding. 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