Pause stage

Meaning

The Pause is the tenth of the twelve life stages, after the Storehouse. Here the phase is at its lowest: the last cycle has run its course and the next has not yet been conceived. The classics call the stage 絕 jué, “Extinction”, a word that means a thread cut, and the Ziping Zhenquan explains it as the moment the former qi has ended and the next is about to take over. The name tells how strong the phase is in this branch, never an event: Ulune calls the stage the Pause.

The tradition reads openness to change and freedom from what came before. A Day Master at its Pause in a pillar’s branch carries little of its own phase there, and so little of its own habits: it can try another way, take what comes, begin from nothing. The stage belongs to new departures, to those who travel light and to the turning points of a life.

Its difficulty is the lack of ground: a phase this low can feel unsupported there and borrow its direction from others. The tradition looks for what gives it a first foothold, and keeps its hope in a saying that has passed into everyday Chinese, 絕處逢生 jué chù féng shēng: at the point where things seem cut off, life is met again.

In practice

• For each Day Master: Jia pauses in Shen, Bing and Wu in Hai, Geng in Yin and Ren in Si; Yi in You, Ding and Ji in Zi, Xin in Mao and Gui in Wu.
• Opposite the office: the Pause stands across the wheel from the Prosperity stage, in the branch that clashes with it, Shen against Jia’s Yin, Hai against Bing’s Si: the lowest point faces the place where the phase took up its work.
• The season’s openers: the yang stems pause in Yin, Si, Shen and Hai, the branches that open the seasons, where other phases are being born; the yin stems in Zi, Wu, Mao and You.
• Before and after: the Pause follows the Storehouse and leads to Conception, where the new cycle begins as a seed.
• On the board, the stage shows under each pillar whose branch is the Day Master’s Pause branch; its reading gives the classical name with its characters and pinyin, and says what it means: the phase’s strength, nothing more.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the stage keeps its classical name, zetsu, jeol and Tuyệt, read as a phase’s strength.
• In the Moon’s cycle, the days of the dark moon, between the last crescent and the new moon, are kept by many traditions as a pause before a beginning: the same moment between two cycles, read in the sky rather than in the branches.

Origin and history

The Pause belongs to 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. Some books call it 胞 bāo instead, the envelope in which a new life is received, which says the same thing from the other side. The Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, explains the stage as the former qi ended and the next about to follow, the hinge between two courses of a phase. Ulune’s readings first called it a pause between one cycle and the next; part 20 of its languages plan made Pause its name and kept 絕 jué with its meaning in the stage’s reading and on this page.

How Ulune calculates it

The Pause is stage 9 of the count, nine branches from the Birth: forward for a yang stem, so Jia, born in Hai, pauses in Shen; backward for a yin stem, so Yi, born in Wu, pauses in You. Earth follows Fire, Wu pausing in Hai with Bing and Ji in Zi with Ding. Since the Prosperity is stage 3, six branches away, the two always clash. 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