What the I Ching Actually Is

The I Ching — 易经, the Book of Changes — is roughly three thousand years old and has been read as an oracle, a philosophy text and a book of strategy. All three readings are still in use, which is why descriptions of it rarely agree.

What it is physically is simple: sixty-four figures called hexagrams, each made of six lines. A line is either solid or broken — yang or yin — and the pattern of six is the whole content.

Sixty-four is just eight times eight

Read the bottom three lines of a hexagram and you get a trigram; read the top three and you get another. Eight trigrams, paired in every possible combination, gives sixty-four — the entire book.

The trigrams are the vocabulary: heaven, earth, thunder, wind, water, fire, mountain, lake. A hexagram is therefore a two-word sentence before you read anything else — "water over earth", "wind over heaven".

The lower trigram is usually read as the inner situation, the upper as the outer one. That is the whole trick of the structure, and it is worth knowing before reading any commentary.

How you get one

Traditionally with fifty yarrow stalks, or more commonly with three coins, thrown six times. Each throw produces a line, and the lines are built from the bottom up.

The coins give four possible results per line, which is how you sometimes get a "changing" line — a line that is turning into its opposite. A hexagram with changing lines is read as two figures: the one you have now, and the one it is becoming.

This is the part most apps skip, and it is the part that carries the meaning. A hexagram without changing lines is a static snapshot; with them, it has a direction.

What it is not

It does not tell you what will happen. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling certainty, which is exactly what the book refuses to give.

What a hexagram does is name the situation you are in — the configuration of forces, what is strong, what is blocked, what the moment asks for. In practice that is more useful than a prediction, because it is something you can act on.

The classical reader's habit is to hold the question lightly and read the answer as a description. If the description fits, you have learned something about the situation. If it does not fit, that is also information.

Reading one

Four things, in order: the name of the hexagram, the judgment (a short statement about the whole situation), the image (a natural metaphor, usually the trigrams), and any changing line.

Beginners tend to read everything at once and end up with nothing. Read the judgment first, sit with it, then look at the changing line.

Our draw does the mechanics — casts the lines, keeps the changing ones, and gives you the hexagram and a plain-English reading of it.