Chapter One Hundred Thirty-Five: The Four Seasons Cycle — the Year First Forms

Volume Four: The Dao Gives Rise to Myriad Things — Life First Sprouts

After spring, summer, autumn, and winter completed one full round, the concept of the year was born. One cycle of the four seasons was one year. Days and nights marked the day; the four seasons marked the year — these two scales complemented each other to form a complete order of time.

The length of a year was roughly three hundred and sixty days and nights. Three hundred and sixty — six times sixty — corresponded to the space-time structure of the six directions and eight orientations.

The significance of the four seasons' cycle lay not only in measuring time, but in providing life with rhythm. A year was the cycle of sowing and reaping, of growth and rest. The rhythm of life moved in synchrony with the rhythm of the earth — this was the Dao of nature.

Time was a spiral. Every spring resembled the one before it yet was different; every winter was akin to the one before it yet not the same. Change within cycles, cycles within change.

The year first forming, the four seasons cycling. Pangu counted the first complete year of the world like a parent marking a child's first full orbit around the sun. Three hundred and sixty days — a small number, but within it lay the template for all the ages to come.