What is the I Ching?
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese book that describes a situation through one of 64 hexagrams and tells you how to act. It is read both as an oracle and as a classic of philosophy.
A short history
The oldest layer of the book is known as the Zhouyi, the Changes of Zhou. It was compiled during the Western Zhou period (roughly 1000 to 750 BCE) from the verdicts used by diviners. Tradition says the legendary Fu Xi discovered the eight trigrams, King Wen arranged them into 64 hexagrams, and his son the Duke of Zhou wrote the line texts. This is tradition rather than history, but it shows how the book understands itself.
In later centuries commentaries known as the Ten Wings were added. Tradition links them to Confucius. In 136 BCE the Han dynasty made the I Ching one of the Five Classics, and for two thousand years it stayed at the centre of Chinese thought. In Europe, Leibniz wrote that he saw his own binary number system in the order of the hexagrams. In the twentieth century Carl Gustav Jung helped the book reach a Western audience.
Yin, yang and the lines
The I Ching works with two basic lines. The solid line is yang: active, strong, moving forward. The broken line is yin: receptive, soft, accepting. They are not enemies but partners; when one reaches its peak it turns into the other.
Three lines make a trigram, and two trigrams make a hexagram. A hexagram is read from the bottom up: the first line at the bottom speaks of the beginning of a situation, the sixth line at the top of its end or its excess.
The eight trigrams
Every hexagram is made of an upper and a lower trigram. Their images are the key to a hexagram's meaning. For example, Water above Fire forms hexagram 63, After Completion.
| Symbol | Trigram | Chinese | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| ☰ | Heaven | 乾 Qián | creative, strong |
| ☱ | Lake | 兌 Duì | joyful, open |
| ☲ | Fire | 離 Lí | clinging, bright |
| ☳ | Thunder | 震 Zhèn | arousing, moving |
| ☴ | Wind | 巽 Xùn | gentle, penetrating |
| ☵ | Water | 坎 Kǎn | deep, dangerous |
| ☶ | Mountain | 艮 Gèn | still, resting |
| ☷ | Earth | 坤 Kūn | receptive, yielding |
How to ask a question
The quality of your question shapes the quality of the answer. Choose something that truly matters to you and focus on one topic.
- Instead of yes or no, ask about the situation: "What kind of path opens if I accept this offer?"
- Ask about yourself: "How should I act in this relationship?" gives a more useful answer than "Does this person love me?"
- Do not ask the same question again just because you disliked the answer. Tradition says the second question clouds the first answer.
The three-coin method
The most common method uses three coins tossed six times. The inscribed side counts as 3, the plain side as 2, and the three coins are added up each time.
- 6: old yin. Broken line, changing.
- 7: young yang. Solid line, stable.
- 8: young yin. Broken line, stable.
- 9: old yang. Solid line, changing.
The first toss gives the first (bottom) line, the sixth toss the top line. You can use this method right in your browser on the online I Ching reading page.
The yarrow stalk method
The older method uses 50 yarrow stalks, and one reading takes about half an hour. The stalks are divided and counted by set rules. The probabilities differ from the coins: 6 comes up with a probability of 1/16, 7 with 5/16, 8 with 7/16 and 9 with 3/16. So a changing yang line appears three times as often as a changing yin line. With coins both are 1/8. Both methods are accepted within the tradition.
How to read changing lines
Changing lines are the heart of a reading. Every line that comes out as 6 or 9 flips into its opposite, creating a second hexagram. The first hexagram describes the present situation, the second the direction it is moving in.
When several lines change, the rules of the twelfth-century scholar Zhu Xi are widely used to decide which to weigh most:
- No changing lines: read only the judgment of the hexagram.
- One changing line: the answer is that line's text.
- Two changing lines: read both; the upper one weighs more.
- Three changing lines: read the judgments of both hexagrams together; the first is primary.
- Four or five changing lines: the weight shifts to the second hexagram and its unchanging lines.
- All six changing: read the judgment of the second hexagram. Hexagrams 1 and 2 have their own texts for this case.
These rules are a guide, not a law. Many readers read every changing line and notice which one speaks most clearly to the question.
The King Wen sequence
The order of the 64 hexagrams used today is known as the King Wen sequence. In it the hexagrams mostly come in pairs: the second is either the first turned upside down or the first with every line reversed. Each hexagram page shows these related hexagrams.