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.
Da Liu Ren (大六壬, “the Great Six Ren”) is a Chinese oracle that answers a question from the exact moment it is asked. Nothing is thrown or drawn: the date and hour themselves are converted into a chart of two rotating plates, and the reading comes from where the twelve earthly branches land on each other. Together with Qi Men Dun Jia and Tai Yi, it is one of the San Shi (三式), the “three cosmic boards” of classical Chinese divination — and of the three it is the one most concerned with the human affairs behind a question: a lawsuit, a journey, a lost object, a match. This article explains what the system is, how a chart is built step by step, and how to read the first layer of one. If you only want a chart, the free Da Liu Ren calculator builds one for any moment.
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.
Consulting the I Ching is a procedure, not a conversation: one real question, three coins thrown six times, a hexagram built line by line from the bottom, and one reading in the book. The whole cast takes five minutes and no special equipment. What this page gives is the procedure itself (掷钱法, the three-coin method), step by step — how to frame the question, which face of the coin counts what, how the six lines are recorded, how to find the hexagram in the book, and which statements to read when lines move — plus the four values a throw can take, a full worked example, the yarrow-stalk method the coins replaced, and the mistakes most first casts make. The book behind these steps is introduced on What Is the I Ching?; this page is the hands-on half.
The I Ching (易经, Yijing, “Classic of Changes”), usually called the Book of Changes in English, is the oldest of the Chinese classics: a single book that has worked as an oracle and been read as philosophy for roughly three thousand years. Its working parts are sixty-four figures called hexagrams (卦 gua), each a column of six whole or broken lines naming one archetypal situation — advance or obstruction, abundance or decline — together with short texts that say how that situation tends to move. What the I Ching is, at its simplest, is a manual for recognizing the pattern of a moment and moving with it rather than against it. This page is the beginner’s introduction: what the book is, how it is built, where it came from, and how it is consulted.
Qi Men Dun Jia (奇门遁甲, also romanized qimen dunjia or shortened to qimen) is one of the classical “three cosmic boards” (San Shi, 三式) of Chinese divination, historically nicknamed the “art of emperors” for its association with military strategy. It takes a chosen moment — its solar term, its day and hour in the stem-branch calendar — and lays that moment out as a nine-palace board of stars, doors and deities, from which the tradition reads which timing and which direction favour the matter at hand. This article explains what the system is, where it came from, how the board is built, and how it differs from the Bazi birth chart and the I Ching oracle; to cast one for yourself, use the free Qi Men Dun Jia calculator.
