Plum Blossom Numerology (Mei Hua Yi Shu): Casting a Hexagram from Numbers and Time

Plum Blossom Numerology (梅花易数, Mei Hua Yi Shu) is the I Ching cast with nothing in your hands. No coins, no yarrow stalks: the hexagram is built from numbers — a number someone says, the strokes of a written word, or most often the date and hour of the moment you ask. Three small divisions turn those numbers into a hexagram and a moving line, and the reading is then done by splitting the hexagram into two halves, the body and the use, and asking which feeds or attacks the other. This page gives the arithmetic step by step, works one cast from start to finish, and sets the method beside the coin cast and liu yao, the two other ways this site reads the same sixty-four hexagrams.

What Plum Blossom Numerology is

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Strip away the name and the method is three moves:

1. Turn the situation into numbers — two for the trigrams, one for the moving line.
2. Turn the numbers into a hexagram by dividing by 8 and by 6 and keeping the remainders.
3. Read the hexagram as body against use through the generating and controlling cycles of the five elements.

Each move is simple; that is the point. A cast takes a minute and needs a pencil at most. The skill the method demands lies elsewhere — in choosing which numbers stand for the matter, and in reading the trigrams’ images afterwards. Chinese practitioners call it 心易, “the Changes of the mind,” for exactly that reason: the arithmetic is mechanical, the judgment is not.

Shao Yong, the plum tree and an attribution

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The method is credited to Shao Yong (邵雍, 1011–1077), the Northern Song thinker who built a whole cosmology out of the numbers of the trigrams. The book that carries the method, 《梅花易数》, is traditionally given to him; its authorship has long been doubted, and the text as it circulates today is generally taken to be a later compilation under his name. What is not in doubt is the lineage: casting by number belongs to the “image and number” (象数) school Shao Yong stands for.

The name comes from a story the book tells, and it is told here as a story. Shao Yong, watching plum blossoms, sees two sparrows fight on a branch and fall. Taking the moment as a sign, he casts a hexagram from the date and hour, and reads in it that a girl will come the next evening to pick the blossoms, fall from the tree and hurt her leg — which, the book says, she did. Whatever happened under that tree, the story carries the method’s founding idea: the moment something catches your attention is the moment to cast.

The numbers of the trigrams

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Every casting step ends in a number from 1 to 8, and each number names a trigram. The order is the pre-heaven (先天) sequence — Qian one, Dui two, Li three, Zhen four, Xun five, Kan six, Gen seven, Kun eight — drawn from the oldest arrangement of the eight trigrams. The classical root is a passage in the Shuogua, which after setting the trigrams in their opposed pairs adds: 「数往者顺,知来者逆,是故易逆数也」 — “to count what is past is to go with the flow; to know what is coming is to go against it; therefore the Changes is counting backwards” (《周易·说卦传》). Plum Blossom takes the line literally: knowing what is coming is a matter of counting.

The element row does the reading later; the number row does the casting now. The two are worth memorising together.

Casting by date and time, step by step

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The most common Plum Blossom cast needs no outside number at all: the moment of asking supplies four. They are counted on the Chinese calendar, not the Western one:

The year and hour branches are the same twelve earthly branches that run through every Chinese calendar art. With the four numbers in hand:

1. Upper trigram — add year + month + day, divide by 8, keep the remainder.
2. Lower trigram — add year + month + day + hour, divide by 8, keep the remainder.
3. Moving line — divide that same four-part total by 6, keep the remainder.

Two conventions trip people up. A remainder of 0 counts as the full divisor — 8 (Kun) for a trigram, 6 (the top line) for the moving line. And lines are counted from the bottom up, as in every I Ching cast: line 1 is the bottom of the lower trigram, line 6 the top of the upper.

A worked cast

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Take an invented moment: a horse (午) year, the 3rd lunar month, the 15th day, in the 申 double-hour (15:00–17:00). The numbers are 7, 3, 15 and 9.

• Upper: 7 + 3 + 15 = 25. 25 ÷ 8 leaves 1 → Qian ☰, heaven.
• Lower: 25 + 9 = 34. 34 ÷ 8 leaves 2 → Dui ☱, lake.
• Moving line: 34 ÷ 6 leaves 4 → line 4 moves.

Heaven over lake is hexagram 10, Lü 履, “Treading.” Line 4 is the bottom line of the upper trigram; flipping that solid line to broken turns Qian into Xun ☴, wind, and the changed hexagram is wind over lake, 61, Zhong Fu 中孚, “Inner Truth.” The whole cast took four additions and three divisions.

Casting by plain numbers works the same way, minus the calendar. Someone names 9 and 14: 9 ÷ 8 leaves 1, Qian above; 14 ÷ 8 leaves 6, Kan below; (9 + 14) ÷ 6 leaves 5, line 5 moves — heaven over water, hexagram 6, Song 讼. Numbers can also come from what is at hand: the strokes of a written character, the count of a sound heard, the number of objects in view. The book gives such methods in quantity; what they share is that the number arrives unbidden, at the moment of asking.

Body and use: how the cast is read

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Here Plum Blossom parts company with the book. A hexagram is two trigrams, and the moving line decides which is which:

• The trigram without the moving line is the body (体, ti) — the asker, the self, the matter’s own ground.
• The trigram with the moving line is the use (用, yong) — the other side, the thing acted upon or acting, the outside world in motion.

The rule is fixed: what moves is use, what stays still is body. The body never moves. The reading is then the relation between the two trigrams’ elements, and there are only five possibilities:

The short form practitioners memorise: what generates or matches the body is good; what drains or attacks it is bad. A second weight is the body’s seasonal strength — a body trigram whose element rules the season can stand an attack; one out of season can be sunk even by a small one.

Two more hexagrams fill out the picture. The nuclear hexagram (互卦), formed from lines 2-3-4 as the lower trigram and 3-4-5 as the upper, is read as the matter’s course in the middle. The changed hexagram (变卦), produced by flipping the moving line, is its outcome. Both are read by the same yardstick: how their trigrams’ elements stand toward the body.

The worked cast, read

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Back to Lü, line 4 moving. The moving line sits in the upper trigram, so Qian is use and Dui is body: the asker is the lake, the matter is heaven. Both are metal — body and use match, a favourable start.

• The course. Lü’s lines from the bottom run solid, solid, broken, solid, solid, solid. Lines 2-3-4 make Li ☲, fire; lines 3-4-5 make Xun ☴, wind. The nuclear hexagram is wind over fire, 37, Jia Ren 家人. Fire controls the metal body — friction along the way; wood is controlled by it — a part of the middle stretch the asker can manage.
• The outcome. The changed hexagram’s use trigram is Xun, wood. Metal controls wood: body controls use — the matter ends in the asker’s hands, though not without effort.

So the cast reads: a matter that begins in step with you, meets resistance in the middle, and closes in your favour at some cost. What the matter is — the question this invented moment lacks — decides how those images are turned into specifics, and that turning is where Plum Blossom readers differ most.

Plum Blossom, the coin cast and liu yao

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All three methods throw — or count — the same sixty-four hexagrams. They part at two points: how the hexagram is produced, and what is read once it exists.

The single moving line is the structural difference that matters most. A coin cast can produce no moving line, or five; Plum Blossom’s arithmetic always yields one, so there is always a body and a use. The introduction to the I Ching describes the book these methods share; the coin method reads its words, liu yao loads its lines with stems and branches, and Plum Blossom simply halves the hexagram. Liu yao moved the difficulty into procedure; Plum Blossom moved it into the reader.

A note for Western readers

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The English name invites a misunderstanding. “Numerology” in the West usually means the numbers are the answer — a life-path 7 carries its own meaning. In Plum Blossom the numbers mean nothing in themselves; they are a doorway, turned at once into trigrams, and the answer lies in the elements of those trigrams. The nearer Western idea is the one Carl Jung reached for when he wrote about the I Ching: synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence between an inner state and an outer event. The sparrows falling at the moment of attention are exactly that. The difference is the usual one — synchronicity is an interpretation of experience, Plum Blossom a procedure for acting on it.

Common mistakes

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Related: How to Consult the I Ching · Liu Yao Divination · The Eight Trigrams · What Is the I Ching? · The Five Elements · back to Divination