Liu Yao Divination: How the Six-Lines Method Reads an I Ching Cast

Liu yao divination (六爻, “six lines”) throws the same hexagram as any I Ching coin cast — and then stops reading the book. Instead of the judgment and the line statements, it loads every line with a heavenly stem, an earthly branch and an element, and answers the question from how those elements feed and fight each other. The three-coin procedure on this site mentions “the six-lines school” in passing as the coin cast’s living tradition in China; this page opens it: what the method is, where it came from, how a cast is loaded in three steps, which line answers which question, and the same worked cast read both ways.

What liu yao is: the najia method

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The method’s formal name is najia divination (纳甲筮法, “taking in the stems”). Na is to take in; jia, the first of the ten heavenly stems, stands for the whole stem-and-branch system. To “take in the stems” is to seat a stem and a branch on each of the six lines — so that a line is no longer only a yin or yang bar but carries a branch, and with it one of the five elements.

That is the decisive split. One set of sixty-four hexagrams, two ways of reading them: the book reads the hexagram through its words; liu yao reads it through the elements seated on its lines. In English the method also goes by six lines divination, the I Ching coin method (which really names only the cast), or Wen Wang Gua (文王卦, “King Wen’s hexagrams”) — a traditional honorific, not a claim about who invented it.

Where it comes from: Jing Fang and the Fire Pearl Forest

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The stem-seating rule is credited to Jing Fang (京房, 77–37 BCE), the Western Han scholar who sorted the sixty-four hexagrams into eight “palaces” and paired every trigram with stems. The text that carries his name gives the pairing in one sentence: 「分天地乾坤之象,益之以甲乙壬癸,震巽之象配庚辛,坎离之象配戊己,艮兑之象配丙丁」 — “divide the images of heaven and earth, Qian and Kun, and add to them jia, yi, ren and gui; the images of Zhen and Xun take geng and xin; Kan and Li take wu and ji; Gen and Dui take bing and ding” (《京氏易传·卷下》). Ten stems, eight trigrams: Qian and Kun take two stems each, the other six one apiece.

The procedure kept evolving for a thousand years. It settled into the form practised today with the Huozhulin (《火珠林》, “Fire Pearl Forest”), a Song-era manual traditionally attributed to a Daoist known as Mayi Daozhe — the attribution is the tradition’s, not a settled fact. Chinese practitioners still sometimes call the method by the book’s name.

From the start liu yao was practical in a way the classic was not. The I Ching asks how to carry yourself inside a situation; liu yao asks whether this one matter will come off. The narrower question explains everything that follows — a dense procedure with explicit rules, teachable step by step.

Casting: the same coins, a different afterlife

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The cast itself is the three-coin method, unchanged: three coins thrown six times, each throw giving one line, the lines stacked from the bottom up. The full procedure, the values 6-7-8-9 and the odds are on the coin-method page. Liu yao keeps its own old names for the four results, counted by how many coins land blank side (背) up:

The doubled and crossed lines move; flipping them gives the changed hexagram, exactly as in a book reading. The difference starts after this point. The book reader now turns to the text. The liu yao reader has three more steps of loading to do first — and once those are done, the text is never opened.

Loading the hexagram, step 1: the palace and the world line

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Jing Fang’s eight palaces regroup the sixty-four hexagrams under the eight trigrams, eight to a palace. Each palace opens with its pure hexagram — the trigram doubled — and the next seven are generated by changing its lines in a fixed order. The palace gives a cast two things. Its element (Qian and Dui metal, Li fire, Zhen and Xun wood, Kan water, Gen and Kun earth) becomes the reference point for everything in step 3. Its rank fixes the world line (世, shi), which stands for the person asking, and the response line (应, ying), which stands for the other side; the two always sit three lines apart.

The Qian palace shows the whole pattern:

Every palace runs the same eight ranks, so a reader who knows a hexagram’s palace and rank knows where its world line sits without a lookup. Whatever palace the cast lands in, it is read in that palace’s element — Gou, Dun or Da You are metal hexagrams because they belong to Qian.

Step 2: seating the stems and branches

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Next, each line receives its branch. The rule goes by trigram, not by hexagram: the lower trigram takes its trigram’s “inner” set of three branches for lines 1–3, the upper trigram takes its trigram’s “outer” set for lines 4–6. The full table — the stems are the ones Jing Fang’s sentence assigns:

Read down the columns and a pattern shows. The four yang trigrams (Qian and its three “sons” Zhen, Kan, Gen) step forward through the yang branches, two at a time — 子 寅 辰 午 申 戌 — each son starting one step further on. The four yin trigrams (Kun and its “daughters” Xun, Li, Dui) step backward through the yin branches — 未 巳 卯 丑 亥 酉. Yang forward, yin backward is the same yin-yang symmetry that runs through the whole calendar.

Once seated, every line has an element — 子 and 亥 water, 寅 and 卯 wood, 巳 and 午 fire, 申 and 酉 metal, 辰 戌 丑 未 earth — and the hexagram has become a small chart of elements.

Step 3: the six relations

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The last layer turns elements into meanings. Take the palace element as “me” and compare it with the element of each line’s branch; the five possible relations in the generating and controlling cycles of the five elements give each line one of the six relations (六亲, liu qin — the traditional name, though five categories do the work):

Readers of a Bazi chart will recognise the logic: the six relations are the divination cousin of the ten gods, which compare every element in a birth chart with the day master the same way. The vocabulary is a world of family roles from an older household, and the gendered pairings (“wife” under Wealth, “husband” under Officer) are the tradition’s own, recorded here as such.

A fourth, lighter layer is the six spirits (六神): Green Dragon, Vermilion Bird, Hook Chen, Flying Snake, White Tiger and Black Tortoise, laid on the lines from the bottom up in that order, starting from a spirit fixed by the day’s stem. They colour a reading — the White Tiger leans toward injury, the Vermilion Bird toward talk and documents — but never decide it.

The use god: which line answers the question

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Here is the step that makes liu yao a method rather than a mood. A cast does not read all six lines. It reads one — the use god (用神, yong shen), the line that stands for the matter asked about — and picks it by relation:

With the use god chosen, the reader weighs its strength against two outside references: the month (月建, the branch of the month of the cast) and the day (日辰, the branch of the day). The stems and branches page shows how those month and day branches are counted. A use god the month and day support is strong; one they control is weak. Then the moving lines: does a moving line generate the use god or attack it? And how does it stand toward the world line? Strong and supported, the matter comes off; weak and attacked, it does not — that is the skeleton of every liu yao judgment, and the rest is detail.

The classic beginner’s failure is not a wrong strength count but a wrong use god. Pick Wealth for a job question and every later step is careful work on the wrong line. That is why traditional teaching starts with “which relation does this matter take?” before anything else.

A worked example: one cast, read the liu yao way

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The coin-method page works one invented cast through the book: the question should I move cities for the new job in spring?, six throws giving hexagram 1, Qian, with only the first line moving — read there as 「潜龙勿用」, “the hidden dragon: do not act,” changing to hexagram 44, Gou. Here is the same cast, loaded.

Qian is the pure hexagram of the Qian palace: palace element metal, world line on top, response line on line 3. Seating the branches (Qian below: 子 寅 辰; Qian above: 午 申 戌) and comparing each with metal:

The question is about a job, so the use god is the Officer line, 午 fire on line 4. Three things then get read:

• The use god and the world line. Fire generates earth: the Officer line feeds the asker’s world line. The job itself, on this reading, is on the asker’s side.
• The moving line. The one moving line is Offspring, 子 water — and water controls fire. In the manuals, a moving Offspring line attacking the Officer is the standard warning sign for any question about position: something in the matter is working against the post.
• What the moving line turns into. Flipped, line 1 becomes the bottom line of Xun, which seats 丑 earth — and earth controls water. A moving line whose own change controls it is said to “turn back and be overcome” (回头克); its attack loses force at the source.

So the loaded chart says: the job favours the asker; a threat to it is real but checked. How much each of those weighs is decided by the month and day of the actual cast, which this invented example does not have — and that is exactly where a real liu yao reading would go next. Note what did not happen: nobody opened the book. The dragon and its warning belong to the other method. That the two readings of this one cast both counsel care is the invented example’s coincidence, not a rule — the two methods often disagree, because they are asking different things of the same six lines.

Liu yao and the book: borrowing the frame, not the words

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Liu yao takes the I Ching’s whole frame — the sixty-four hexagrams, the line positions, the upper and lower trigrams, a “this hexagram changing to that” result. It sets aside the text the introduction to the I Ching describes: judgments, line statements and commentary barely figure.

Liu yao is best seen as a branch grown out of the I Ching, not a commentary on it. Change the question from “how should I stand?” to “will it happen?” and the whole technique has to change with it.

A reader’s comparison: horary astrology

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The closest Western relative is not the I Ching as most English readers use it. It is horary astrology: a chart drawn for the moment a single question is asked, one point in the chart assigned to the matter (the ruler of the relevant house, where liu yao takes the use god), and a judgment from that point’s strength and its relations to the rest — yes or no, this matter, no life philosophy. The structure is close enough that each can serve as a map of the other.

The difference sits where it always has between the two traditions. A horary chart is taken from the actual sky at the moment of asking; a liu yao chart comes from three coins on a table, and only then is set against the real calendar through the month and day branches. One reads the heavens as they are; the other casts a figure and asks the calendar to weigh it.

Five beginner mistakes

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Related: How to Consult the I Ching · What Is the I Ching? · The Eight Trigrams · Stems and Branches · The Five Elements · back to Divination · Foundations