I Ching Oracle Guide
I Ching guide
Background to the oracle: how the book works, how to consult it and what sets the methods apart.
Getting started
The basics to get going: what the book is and how you consult it.
- What is the I Ching? The Book of Changes explainedThe I Ching is China's oldest wisdom book: 64 hexagrams about change. Learn what the book is, how a consultation works, and what it can and cannot tell you.
- How to Consult the I ChingLearn how to consult the I Ching step by step: asking an open question, casting six lines, reading judgment and image, and working with changing lines.
The methods
Three ways to cast, from the classical ritual to a quick calculation.
- The yarrow stalk oracle: the oldest way to consult the I ChingLearn how the yarrow stalk oracle works: fifty stalks, three countings per line, the classical probabilities, and how to cast the stalks online.
- Coins or yarrow stalks: how do you cast the I Ching?Coins or yarrow stalks for the I Ching? Compare the two probability distributions, see what the difference means in practice and pick the method that fits you.
- How to calculate your I Ching hexagramFrom throw to hexagram: learn the line values 6, 7, 8 and 9, build from the bottom up, read the two trigrams and find the correct King Wen number.
Understanding a reading
How to read the lines, the trigrams and the answer in a reading.
- Changing lines and the second hexagramLearn how old yin and old yang activate the line texts and why the second hexagram shows the direction of your situation, not a second prediction.
- The Eight Trigrams: The Alphabet of the I ChingMeet the eight trigrams of the I Ching: eight images from nature that together form all sixty-four hexagrams, and learn how to recognize them in a reading.
- Can the I Ching answer yes or no?The I Ching gives no bare yes or no, but a picture of your situation and its direction. Learn to reframe a closed question and read the judgment.
Going deeper
For anyone who wants to look further than a single consultation.
- The I Ching and Jung: synchronicityCarl Gustav Jung wrote the foreword to the 1950 I Ching translation and named its principle synchronicity: meaningful coincidence. What did he mean by it?
- A daily I Ching cast: the oracle as a morning ritualOne cast each morning, without a question: the hexagram as the theme of your day. On the yarrow ritual as a pause, the journal as memory, and the weekly review.
The world around the I Ching
History, scholars and the people who brought the book to the West.
- When a hexagram was still a string of numbersHow the I Ching grew out of oracle bones and number sequences: what Chinese scholars found, what they still dispute, and why yin and yang arrived later.
- The Ten Wings: the commentaries that turned an oracle into a philosophyWhat the Ten Wings are, why Confucius did not write them, and how Song scholars, excavated manuscripts and Wilhelm shape how the I Ching is now read.
- The King Wen sequence: the pairs are known, the key is notThe 64 hexagrams stand in 32 pairs. Kong Yingda already named the form rule in the Tang; why the pairs themselves stand in this order, nobody knows.
- Silk from Mawangdui: the I Ching before there was one sequenceIn 1973 a silk Zhouyi emerged from a Han tomb at Mawangdui. Sequence, names and companion texts show that the I Ching was not yet one fixed book.
- The Zhouyi without a single authorScholars agree that the Zhouyi has no single author. After that the disputes begin: oracle or wisdom, dating, and what yuan heng li zhen means.
- What Leibniz recognized in the hexagrams, and what he missedLeibniz had binary arithmetic ready by 1679. In 1703 he recognized it in Shao Yong's diagram, which Bouvet took for Fu Xi's. The match is real; the I Ching did not predict the computer.
- The missionary who baptized no one, and the I Ching the West receivedHow Richard Wilhelm (卫礼贤) in Qingdao, with Lao Naixuan, made the I Ching a German book, and why that version gained authority in the West and later came under fire.
- Jung asked the I Ching whether he might introduce it to the WestIn 1949 Jung consulted the I Ching about his own foreword. Two hexagrams answered. Chinese scholars ask different questions about Jung and the I Ching than the West does.
- Every translation makes a different I ChingI Ching translations each choose a different layer of the text and a different commentarial tradition. Chinese translation studies show how far Wilhelm, Legge and later editions diverge.
- What Cage and Dick let the I Ching doCage used the I Ching so he would not have to choose; Dick used it to steer a novel. Chinese sources tell that story differently, and the 1960s made something else of it again.
- How McKenna turned the King Wen sequence into 21 December 2012McKenna read a time wave ending in 2012 into the King Wen sequence. This essay shows how he got there, what Chinese sources make of it, and why the mathematics does not hold.
- The I Ching in China today: heritage, fever and a split fileSince 1978 China has officially rebuilt Yixue research. Commercial fortune-telling remains under fire. This essay sets out that split from Chinese sources.
Elsewhere on the web
What other makers write about the I Ching.