The Twelve Life Stages

The twelve stations are what the old five-phase masters arrived at by walking the ten heavenly stems around the twelve earthly branches to show the rise and fall of fortune — twelve states of the five phases. The first of them, Growth (长生), stands for the whole set, which is why the set carries its name. The order is fixed and it starts over: Growth → Bathing → Cap & Sash → Taking Office → Peak → Decline → Illness → Death → Tomb → Extinction → Conception → Nurture.

They represent the entire course by which anything comes into being, develops, flourishes, decays and passes away. Everything made goes through forming, holding, breaking and emptying; every living thing is born, ages, sickens and dies. Ten stems laid across twelve branches model exactly that. Both BaZi and Qimen Dunjia rely on them, and both treat them as required ground. Several stations carry a second, older name — Bathing is also called Defeat, Taking Office also Salaried, Tomb also Storehouse, Extinction also Receiving Qi.

The questions they answer are of this kind: is the matter growing or decaying? What state is a career, or money, in right now? Twelve points at which yin and yang, the five phases, the stems, the branches, time and space all meet — twelve fortunes, running like a sine wave or an ECG trace, a cycle that repeats and never runs out.

The twelve fall into halves: Growth through Peak is the rising half, Decline through Extinction the falling half. Fortune, however, is graded station by station and does not line up neatly with those halves: Growth, Cap & Sash, Taking Office and Peak are thriving; Death, Tomb and Extinction are adverse; and the remaining five — Bathing, Decline, Illness, Conception and Nurture — are plain. Bathing sits on the rising half yet grades only plain, because what has just been washed is not yet fixed in shape. Decline and Illness sit on the falling half yet are also only plain: something past its peak still works. A used-god at Conception is not a failure either; it is an answer that has not been born yet.

The fortune column grades the station, not your chart. Whether a stem actually has ground under it on the board is settled by the month: that is what seasonal strength decides, and the same stem at Decline is not the same thing in a month that supports its element as in a month that drains it. A concrete case: at the same station of Peak, a 丙 in a winter month is dead by the month while a 丙 in a summer month is thriving by it — same station, different force. Read the station for the shape of the moment, read the month for the force behind it, and never let one stand in for both.

Yang Runs Forward, Yin Runs Back

Each palace carries its own branches: 坎 1 is 子, 震 3 is 卯, 离 9 is 午, 兑 7 is 酉. The four corner palaces carry two each: 艮 8 is 丑 and 寅, 巽 4 is 辰 and 巳, 坤 2 is 未 and 申, 乾 6 is 戌 and 亥. The centre carries none. Finding a stem's station takes two steps: see which palace it landed in and which branch that palace carries, then look that branch up in the stem's own twelve-station table.

Take 丙 as an example. 丙 grows at 寅, peaks at 午, tombs at 戌; 寅 is 艮 8, 午 is 离 9, 戌 is 乾 6. So 丙 in 艮 8 is at Growth, 丙 in 离 9 is at Peak, and 丙 in 乾 6 is entombed — one stem, three palaces, from the freshest start to sealed away.

Two facts generate the whole table. First, each of the ten stems starts its cycle at a fixed branch — its Growth position. Second, the five yang stems (甲丙戊庚壬) run forward through the branches while the five yin stems (乙丁己辛癸) run backward. Fix the starting branch and the direction, and the remaining eleven stations follow in order.

It reads even more sharply from the other side. In that same 离 9, 丙 is at Peak, 庚 at Bathing, 辛 at Illness, 壬 at Conception. Four stems in one palace, four completely different stations — because each stem has a table of its own, and you use the table of whichever stem you are asking about. So settle the used-god first: whatever the question is about, look up the stem that stands for it.

Tomb or Vault: the Month Decides

A stem landing in its tomb palace is not yet a verdict of entombment. One check sits in between: is the stem in season or out of season in the month? Landing in the tomb palace is a position; being entombed is a judgment. Most write-ups treat those as one thing — find the stem, find its tomb palace, call it entombed — and stop halfway.

If the stem is in season (旺相) and lands in its tomb palace, it is stored (入库): money placed in a vault. Inconvenient, not lost. It is out of circulation for now, and it becomes spendable again the moment the tomb branch is struck open. This is not an unfavourable reading. If the stem is out of season (休囚) and lands in the same palace, it is genuinely entombed (入墓): sealed in, with the matter unable to move until the chart itself changes. Same palace, same stem, opposite conclusions — and the only thing that separates them is the month.

Confuse the two and the error always runs the same way: something merely parked gets read as something finished. The person who has simply gone quiet, the deal shelved for a quarter, the file that is filed rather than lost — read as dead, and the reading tells someone to give up on a matter that was still coming back. Open the tomb and all of them return. So read seasonal strength before you read the tomb.

Reading It on a Real Chart

Reading a used-god takes two lookups; drop either one and the conclusion will not hold. First the station: find your used-god, see which palace it sits in and which branch that palace carries, then read that branch off the stem’s own table — thriving, plain, or adverse. Second the month: is the stem in season or out of season. At the Tomb station neither can be skipped. With both in hand, take it to timing: a symbol that is thriving and in season usually arrives under its own power; one that is adverse or out of season waits for a trigger — and for an entombed symbol that trigger is the day its tomb branch is struck.

One more thing to watch: the station should match the person’s actual season of life. Peak on someone past sixty does not read as vigour — what is already at its ceiling has only one direction left, so an older person’s symbol at Peak is over-extension, not strength. Peak on someone young is genuine strength. It runs the other way too: Decline on a young person, or Death, Extinction and Conception in mid-life, are the same mismatch reversed. What you are watching for is the mismatch, not the station itself. It tells you to look one layer deeper; it is not a conclusion. For anything touching health, keep to the framing on health questions — a way to think, never a substitute for a doctor.

Last: the twelve stations tell you how much force a symbol has; the door, the star, the deity and the stem combinations tell you what it is doing. Keep those two apart. A used-god at Peak inside a bad formation means the bad thing arrives with more force — it does not turn the bad thing good. Every station name in this article is in the glossary, which is the fastest place to check a single term while reading a chart.