Prosperity stage

Meaning

Prosperity is the fourth of the twelve life stages, after the Crown. The classics call it 臨官 línguān, “approaching office”, and the Ziping Zhenquan explains it as a person grown from youth to strength, fit to serve: the phase takes up its office. Its other name is 祿 lù, the stipend an official lived on, and when it falls in the month the stage is called 建祿 jiànlù, the stipend established.

The tradition reads independence, competence and the strength to stand on one’s own. Here a stem is on its own ground in the plainest sense: the branch’s main qi is the stem itself, Jia in Yin, Geng in Shen, Gui in Zi, and for Wu and Ji the branch holds them close behind its main qi. A Day Master at its Prosperity stage in a pillar’s branch is read as capable and self-supporting there, with means of its own and no need to borrow.

Its difficulty is the self-sufficient one’s. A phase that has everything it needs may take on too much alone, or hold its own ground so firmly that it shares it reluctantly; the classics look for what gives that strength an outlet, the work, the expression or the responsibility it can serve.

In practice

• For each Day Master: Jia prospers in Yin, Bing and Wu in Si, Geng in Shen and Ren in Hai; Yi in Mao, Ding and Ji in Wu, Xin in You and Gui in Zi.
• The Prosperity star: the same branch is the Day Master’s Prosperity star, 祿神, which Ulune finds in any pillar whose branch it is.
• The Prosperity structure: when the month branch is the Day Master’s Prosperity branch, Ulune names the chart’s Prosperity structure, 建祿格: a Day Master standing in its own month, read as building by its own hands.
• Strength: a branch whose main qi is the Day Master’s own stem roots it with that branch’s largest share, and in the month it also meets Ulune’s test of the season.
• Before and after: Prosperity follows the Crown and leads to the Peak; across the wheel, in the clashing branch, stands its Pause, the low point opposite the office.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the stage is usually called by its other name, kenroku in Japan and geollok in Korea, the established stipend; Vietnam says Lâm Quan.
• In Chinese popular religion the stipend has its god: Lu, 祿 lù, one of the three star gods of good fortune, long life and office, still pictured on New Year prints in an official’s robe.
• In Western astrology the nearest idea is a planet in its domicile, the sign it rules, where it acts with its own means: the same picture of a force on its own ground, drawn from the signs rather than from the branches.

Origin and history

The stipend is among the oldest words of Chinese birth reading. 祿 named an official’s salary in the Zhou and Han, and its place among the branches was counted long before the Zi Ping school, which kept it at the centre of its twelve stages. The Yuanhai Ziping, of the Song, and the San Ming Tong Hui, of the Ming, give the ten stems’ Prosperity branches as the tradition still teaches them. The Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, explains the stage by a person fit for office and gives the Prosperity structure its own chapter, beside the Rob Wealth of the month: a frame with no god of its own, read by the other gods that show beside it.

How Ulune calculates it

Prosperity is stage 3 of the count, three branches from the Birth: forward for a yang stem, so Jia, born in Hai, prospers in Yin; backward for a yin stem, so Yi, born in Wu, prospers in Mao. Earth follows Fire, Wu prospering in Si with Bing and Ji in Wu with Ding. Ulune’s tables of the Prosperity star and of the structure use the same branch for each Day Master: Yin, Mao, Si, Wu, Si, Wu, Shen, You, Hai and Zi, from Jia to Gui. 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