Yarrow Stalks

What the I Ching is, and how to read a hexagram

A book of sixty-four short texts, each hung on a figure of six lines, that people have consulted for about three thousand years. Here is what it is, how a reading works, and what to make of it.

Seven in ten

In 1973 a tomb at 馬王堆 gave up a copy of the book written on silk around 190 BC, with commentaries no one had read for two thousand years. In one of them, called 要, the disciple 子貢 asks Confucius whether he, of all people, believes in the stalks. The master's answer, as the silk has it: “I have divined a hundred times and been right seventy” (吾百占而七十當). Then he says what he is really after is the sense of the text, not the omen. That is the stance this site takes too: a text to think with, and no promises.

What the book is

The 周易, the Changes of Zhou, is a manual compiled around the ninth century BC from older diviners' records. It has 64 hexagrams; each has a short Judgment (卦辭) and six line statements (爻辭), 386 statements in all counting two extras, under five thousand characters. That core is what the diviners used. Over the following centuries it gained a set of commentaries, the Ten Wings (十翼), which explain the Judgments (彖), draw an Image from the two trigrams (象), and, for the first two hexagrams, go word by word (文言). Later Chinese thought treated the whole as philosophy: when the First Emperor burned the books in 213 BC, this one was spared as a mere book of divination, and so it survived to become the first of the classics.

On every hexagram page here the three layers are kept apart and labelled: the Zhou text, the Wings, and this site's own plain reading. James Legge's 1882 English stands beside the Chinese clause by clause; it is public domain and faithful, and it reads as Victorian, which is why the plain reading is there as well.

How to read a figure

A line is either whole (yang, ⚊) or broken (yin, ⚋). Three lines make a trigram, and there are eight: 乾 heaven ☰, 坤 earth ☷, 震 thunder ☳, 巽 wind ☴, 坎 water ☵, 離 fire ☲, 艮 mountain ☶, 兌 lake ☱. Two trigrams, one above the other, make a hexagram, and eight times eight is sixty-four. Figures are read from the bottom up: line 1 is the lowest, line 6 the top. The lower trigram is the inner situation, the upper the outer.

Two figures teach the rest. 11 泰 11 泰 Tài has heaven below and earth above: heaven's force rises, earth's settles, the two meet, and the name means peace. 12 否 12 否 Pǐ is the same two trigrams the other way up: they pull apart, and the name means obstruction. Turn any figure upside down and you have its neighbour in the book. On the page of all 64 you can tap through them.

How a cast works

  1. Hold one concrete question. One question, one cast; the old rule is not to ask the same thing twice.
  2. Throw three coins. Heads count 3, tails 2, so the sum is 6, 7, 8 or 9. Odd is a whole line, even a broken one. A 7 or 8 is a line at rest; a 6 or 9 is an old line, one that is about to change.
  3. Throw six times and draw the lines from the bottom up. That is your hexagram: read its Judgment and its plain reading.
  4. Read the statement of each changing line; they are the specific part of the answer. Then flip the changing lines and you have a second hexagram, the direction things are moving. If no line changes, read the first hexagram as it stands.

The cast page does all of this with coins, with yarrow stalks the slow way, or from the date and hour alone, and answers the usual questions about the method underneath. The result opens the hexagram's page with the changing lines marked.

Is it accurate?

Nobody can show that it is, and the book never claims to be. Two honest things can be said. The texts are short and old and speak in images, so a reader finds her own situation in them, which is the same effect that makes a horoscope feel personal. And the texts are also unusually good at describing situations: waiting, conflict, return, excess, a thing nearly finished. A philosopher of the third century BC, 荀子, put it this way: the one who really knows the Changes does not divine (善為易者不占). The hexagram does not hand you an answer; it hands you a different angle on your question, and the thinking is yours.

Already around you

If you know any Chinese at all, you have quoted this book. 自強不息, keep strengthening yourself, and 厚德載物, carry things with deep character, are the Images of 1 乾 1 乾 Qián and 2 坤 2 坤 Kūn. 革命, revolution, is the commentary on 49 革 49 革 Gé: Tang and Wu “changed the mandate”. 突如其來, out of nowhere, is line 4 of 30 離 30 離 Lí; 不速之客, the uninvited guest, is line 6 of 5 需 5 需 Xū. Each hexagram page has a block of the words that came from it. In Beijing, the three halls at the heart of the Forbidden City are named 乾清宮, 交泰殿 and 坤寧宮: heaven, the meeting, and earth, which is 11 泰 11 泰 Tài laid out in stone. And the book ends not with completion but with 64 未濟 64 未濟 Wèi Jì, not yet across the river.

Where to start

Sources