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.
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.
Most feng shui introductions begin with the eight-direction map — the chart behind “wealth corner” and “career direction.” That map is downstream of something older: eight three-line symbols, each a different stacking of a solid and a broken line — the yin and yang pair — that are the working vocabulary of the I Ching, of feng shui direction-reading, and of Chinese divination generally. The eight trigrams (八卦, bāguà) are what this page lays out: how the symbols are built, the full table of names, images, elements and family roles, the classical passages the table comes from, the difference between the pre-heaven and post-heaven arrangements, and how a trigram is actually read.
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.
