Peak: the cell of the sun at noon

Peak: the sun at its highest point

At noon the sun stands as high as it will ever stand, its light at full strength, a breath before it leans west. That position of ripeness gives the fifth cell its name, Peak (帝旺), literally "the emperor flourishing".

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Position sketch: the positions come from the site engine's twelve-stage table; the purple lines join the two clashing pairs, Rat with Horse and Rabbit with Rooster, the months of the solstices and the equinoxes.

The Sanming Tiyao (三命提要), preserved in juan 2 of the Sanming Tonghui (三命通会), gives the cell a single sentence:

Peak: things have ripened, like a person at the height of his prosperity.

From the "flowering and fruit" of the previous cell to the "ripening" of this one, the fruit is ready. Then look at the positions: the Peak of a Yang stem falls on Rat, Rabbit, Horse or Rooster, and each of those four months holds a solstice or an equinox (the Rat month holds the winter solstice, the Rabbit month the spring equinox, the Horse month the summer solstice and the Rooster month the autumn equinox); the Peak of a Yin stem falls on Tiger, Snake, Monkey or Pig.

The Peak position is also the site's Yang Blade position

The site engine's Symbolic Star table has a Yang Blade (羊刃) with a simple rule: it is taken for Yang stems only, on that stem's Peak branch. Put the two tables next to each other:

The two tables coincide completely for Yang stems, yet they are not one table: one gives the stage of a Day Stem, the other is a Symbolic Star. In an "alternative method" in its section on Luck Pillars, the Yuanhai Ziping (渊海子平) puts the Yang Blade on the "unlucky" side, yet in the same passage puts Peak on the "lucky" side; the book itself reads the two apart, and a reading of the Symbolic Star cannot be carried over to the stage name. For how Symbolic Stars sit in a chart, see where Symbolic Stars sit in a chart.

"The sun at noon starts to tilt": at the limit, the turn begins

The Sanming Tiyao writes the cell after Peak, Decline (its entry nine), as "things' forms fade, like a person's energy fading". Decline sits right after Peak, and with three cells side by side one can see an order in the book:

Juan 2 of the Sanming Tonghui states the principle in one passage:

The order of the seasons: when a term is full it withers. The nature of the five elements: when work is done it overturns. So Yang at its limit descends and Yin at its limit rises; the sun at noon begins to tilt and the full moon begins to wane. This is the constant way of heaven.

A season that has run its course fades and a finished work topples; Yang at its limit turns down and Yin at its limit turns up; the sun at noon starts to lean and the full moon starts to wane. In the book this passage follows the seasonal ranking of the five states and leads into the twelve stages (the three lines above among them); it is not said of Peak alone. Read against the twelve stages, Decline comes right after Peak, which fits "Yang at its limit descends". So Peak is the name of a summit position, and the cell right after it is already Decline.

Two kinds of "strong", set side by side

The Peak of the twelve stages and the "thriving" of the five seasonal states appear one after the other in the same section of juan 2, yet they have different references. The first asks which branch a Day Stem has reached; the second asks where an element ranks in which season:

Compare them and you find that Yang Wood has Peak at Rabbit (spring), Yang Fire at Horse (summer), Yang Metal at Rooster (autumn) and Yang Water at Rat (winter), each in the season when its own element rules, so for these four stems the two meanings of "strong" point to the same place; Yang Earth has Peak at Horse (summer), while this section puts Earth's strength in the sixth month, the Goat month, and another passage of the same juan has Earth thriving in the last month of each season; neither includes Horse, so the two no longer coincide. So when the word "strong" appears, first ask which table it comes from.

How the book puts Peak into Luck Pillars

When it discusses Luck Pillars the book splits the stages into those you "meet" and those you "turn your back on", quoting the monk Ying (瑩和尚):

Meet it with Establishment and Peak, and what is yet to come advances; turn your back with resting, discarded, dead and extinct, and what is accomplished retreats.

This is the Sanming Tonghui's reading of luck, and it goes on to attach conditions such as "one must check the foundation of the birth chart". When you find Peak in a table, put the cell back where it belongs: after Establishment and before Decline, the name of the summit; whether a Luck Pillar is good has a whole separate set of conditions.

The cell before is Establishment and the next is Decline; the full table is in the twelve life stages and void branches.