The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is a Chinese text built on 64 figures
called hexagrams, each with a short passage of commentary and advice. It
is one of the oldest books that people still consult.
Lines, trigrams and hexagrams
- Line
- Either solid (yang) or broken (yin).
- Trigram
-
Three lines. There are eight: Heaven, Earth, Thunder, Water, Mountain,
Wind, Fire and Lake.
- Hexagram
-
Two trigrams stacked, six lines in all. Two kinds of line in six
places gives 26 = 64 hexagrams.
- Changing line
-
A line at its extreme, about to turn into its opposite. Changing lines
turn the first hexagram into a second one, which shows where things
are heading.
Casting a hexagram
The common modern method throws three coins six times, building the
hexagram from the bottom line up. Each throw adds up to 6, 7, 8 or 9
(heads count 3 and tails 2): 6 is an old yin line and 9 an old yang
line, and both are changing lines, while 7 is a steady yang line and 8 a
steady yin line. The older yarrow-stalk method gives the same four
results with different odds.
A short history
-
Late Western ZhouThe core text, the Zhouyi, takes shape around the 9th
century BCE as a manual of divination: the hexagrams, a statement
for each, and a saying for each line.
-
Warring States to HanA set of commentaries called the Ten Wings is added, and the book
becomes one of the Confucian classics. Tradition credits Confucius
with the commentaries; modern scholars see many hands.
-
1703Gottfried Leibniz, sent a diagram of the hexagrams by the Jesuit
Joachim Bouvet, sees in them his own binary numbers.
-
1923 and 1950Richard Wilhelm publishes his German translation, and Cary F.
Baynes’s English version follows in 1950 with a foreword by
Carl Jung.
This app follows the traditional King Wen sequence, the order in which
the hexagrams appear in the book.
How to read it
Traditionally you bring a real question, cast a hexagram, and read its
text, then the text of any changing lines, then the second hexagram.
Like tarot, it works best as a prompt for thinking a situation through
rather than as a prediction. The summaries and advice in this app were
written for it, so they are short pointers and not a replacement for a
full translation.
Back to I Ching Reading