Yijing

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.