Disciplines

I Ching

EE JING

Divinatory Disciplines

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "I Ching." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/disciplines/i-ching.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). I Ching. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/disciplines/i-ching

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-i-ching,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {I Ching},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/disciplines/i-ching},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Origin 1000 BCE to 750 BCE

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is one of the oldest Chinese classics, at once a divination manual and a work of philosophy. Its structure rests on sixty-four hexagrams, each a stack of six horizontal lines that are either broken, for yin, or unbroken, for yang, and built from the eight trigrams that stand for fundamental forces such as heaven, earth, water, fire, thunder, wind, mountain, and lake. A reading is obtained by generating a hexagram, traditionally by sorting yarrow stalks or casting three coins, with changing lines transforming one hexagram into a second and so mapping a present situation and its tendency. Each hexagram and line carries a judgment and image whose terse, poetic text is interpreted for guidance. Layered with the commentaries known as the Ten Wings, the work became central to both Confucian and Taoist thought and a cornerstone of Chinese cosmology, ethics, and the art of acting in harmony with change.

Facts

Origins

Origin Period

1000 BCE to 750 BCE 1Zhou Yi and the Ten Wings

Origin Period

300 BCE to 100 BCE 2Zhou Yi and the Ten Wings

Place of Origin

China 3

Attributed Author / Compiler

None of the four attributions is sustainable: the Zhou Yi core is anonymous divination material of the early Zhou, and the Ten Wings are a later and separate stratum 1

Attributed Author / Compiler

Tradition ascribes the trigrams to Fu Xi, the hexagram statements to King Wen, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou and the Ten Wings to Confucius 1

Status

Status Today

Living tradition, practised today 1

Learn More

The Oracle, and How a Hexagram Is Obtained

The Book of Changes is a divination manual that became a philosophical classic, and the two functions have been carried together for two and a half thousand years.

Its units are the hexagram: six stacked lines, each broken for yin or unbroken for yang, giving sixty-four possible figures. Each hexagram is read as two trigrams, upper and lower, drawn from the eight three-line figures that stand for heaven, earth, thunder, water, mountain, wind, fire and lake. Each hexagram carries a judgment and an image, terse and often obscure, and each of its six lines carries its own line statement.

A consultation generates a hexagram by a randomising procedure. The older method sorts fifty yarrow stalks through a repeated division that takes some minutes per line; the common shortcut casts three coins six times. Both produce not only a line but its stability: a line may be young or old, and old lines are changing, converting to their opposite and so transforming the first hexagram into a second. The reader interprets the first figure as the present situation, the changing lines as where the pressure lies, and the second as the direction of movement. Consultation with no changing lines is read as a static situation.

The two methods do not produce identical probability distributions, a point noticed and argued about within the tradition and by modern commentators, since yarrow makes changing yang lines rarer than coins do.

What the text supplies is not an answer but an image to think against. Serious practice treats the terseness as the point: the figures are read against the question, and the work is done by the reader rather than by the book.

Layers, and What the Ten Wings Did to It

The Book of Changes is not one book, and separating its layers is the single most useful thing to know about it.

The oldest layer is the Zhou Yi: the sixty-four hexagrams with their judgments and line statements, dating to the Western Zhou period, roughly the early first millennium BCE. Tradition ascribes it to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou. Read on its own, without commentary, it is a divination record, terse, concrete, full of omens, sacrifices, captives, marriages and journeys, and with very little philosophy in it.

The philosophy is the second layer. The Ten Wings, commentaries traditionally ascribed to Confucius and now generally dated to the Warring States and early Han periods, are what turned a diviner's manual into a cosmological work. The Great Treatise among them supplies the account of yin and yang, of change as the fundamental fact, and of the sage who acts in accordance with the moment, ideas that became foundational for both Confucian and Taoist thought and that most readers now take to be what the book is about.

Excavated manuscripts have complicated the picture usefully. A silk text found at Mawangdui in 1973 preserves a different hexagram order and commentaries not in the received edition, which is direct evidence that the tradition was more various than the transmitted canon suggests.

In the West the book arrived largely through Richard Wilhelm's German translation and its English rendering, which carries an explicitly philosophical and psychological reading; Carl Jung's foreword to that edition introduced the notion of synchronicity as a way of accounting for the oracle without causation. That framing has shaped Western use ever since, and it is a twentieth-century framing rather than a Chinese one, which is worth keeping in view when the book is described as ancient wisdom.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

The Book of Changes is organised as sixty-four hexagrams, one for each arrangement of six lines that are each either broken or unbroken.

Source Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I Ching, or Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in ChinaRichard J. Smith

Cary F. Baynes

Cleromancy

Casting yarrow or coins is cleromancy with a book attached.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Duke of Zhou

Why this is disputed. Tradition assigns the line statements of the I Ching's hexagrams to the Duke of Zhou and the judgments to his father, King Wen, but neither attribution appears in anything datable to their own eleventh century BCE. Modern Sinology generally treats the received text as a composite that took shape over a longer period, with the historical figures serving as culture-hero attributions for material whose actual authorship and date of composition remain genuinely debated among scholars working from the text's own internal linguistic and structural evidence rather than from the traditional ascription itself.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

I Ching (Book of Changes)

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Richard Wilhelm

Belongs to Tradition

Chinese Folk Religion

Folk practice uses the text as a working oracle generated with three coins or with yarrow stalks, consulted on marriage, business and travel, and at temples where the related bamboo-stick divination serves the same purpose.

Source Mawangdui silk manuscripts of the LaoziLaozi (attributed)

Confucianism

The Ten Wings commentaries, traditionally ascribed to Confucius, made the manual a classic of the Confucian canon, read for guidance on timely and ethical action; it became one of the Five Classics and part of the imperial examination curriculum.

Source Mawangdui silk manuscripts of the LaoziLaozi (attributed)

Taoism

The Book of Changes is foundational Taoist material: yin and yang, the eight trigrams and the doctrine of continuous change are the same cosmology Taoist ritual and inner alchemy work with, and the text is read philosophically as much as cast.

Source Mawangdui silk manuscripts of the LaoziLaozi (attributed)

Derived from This

Baguazhang

Baguazhang takes its name and the organisation of its palm changes from the eight trigrams of the Yijing.

Source Lost T'ai-chi Classics from the Late Ch'ing DynastyDouglas Wile

Related To

Earlier Heaven Bagua

Later Heaven Bagua

The Ten Wings

The Wings are why the I Ching is read as a cosmology and not only consulted as an oracle.

Studied By

Cheng Yi

His commentary reads the hexagrams as moral and political situations rather than as prognostications.

Jing Fang

He distributed the hexagrams across the year and attached stems and branches to the lines; that apparatus is the basis of the Liu Yao method still practised.

Joachim Bouvet

The Figurist reading held that the hexagrams preserved a primitive revelation given to all humanity.

Shao Yong

Wang Bi

He swept away the Han correlative apparatus and argued that the images are means to a meaning, which decided Yijing reading for a thousand years.

Works With

Abundance

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

After Completion

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Approach

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Before Completion

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Biting Through

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Breakthrough

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Coming to Meet

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Conflict

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Contemplation

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Darkening of the Light

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Decrease

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Deliverance

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Development

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Difficulty at the Beginning

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Dispersion

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Dui

The eight bagua trigrams, each hexagram being a pair of them.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Duration

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Enthusiasm

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Fellowship

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Following

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Gathering Together

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Gen

The eight bagua trigrams, each hexagram being a pair of them.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Grace

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Great Possession

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Great Power

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Great Preponderance

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Great Taming

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Holding Together

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Increase

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Influence

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Inner Truth

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Innocence

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Kan

The eight bagua trigrams, each hexagram being a pair of them.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Keeping Still

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Kun

The eight bagua trigrams, each hexagram being a pair of them.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The eight bagua trigrams, each hexagram being a pair of them.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Limitation

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Modesty

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Nourishment

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Obstruction

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Opposition

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Oppression

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Peace

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Progress

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Pushing Upward

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Qian

The eight bagua trigrams, each hexagram being a pair of them.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Retreat

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Return

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Revolution

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Small Preponderance

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Small Taming

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Splitting Apart

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Standstill

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Abysmal

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Army

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Arousing

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Cauldron

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Clinging

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Creative

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Family

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Gentle

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Joyous

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Marrying Maiden

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Receptive

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Wanderer

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

The Well

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Treading

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Waiting

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Work on the Decayed

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Xun

The eight bagua trigrams, each hexagram being a pair of them.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Youthful Folly

The sixty four hexagrams of the Zhou Yi.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Zhen

The eight bagua trigrams, each hexagram being a pair of them.

Source Zhouyi: The Book of ChangesRichard Rutt (trans.)

Sources

1. Zhouyi: The Book of Changes

Richard Rutt (trans.), Curzon Press, 1996introduction: the date and character of the Zhou Yi as divination recordView the Source

2. The Five "Confucian" Classics

Michael Nylan, Yale University Press, 2001ch. on the Changes and the formation of the Ten WingsView the Source

3. The I Ching, or Book of Changes

Richard Wilhelm (trans.); Cary F. Baynes (English trans.), Princeton University Press, 1980The Wilhelm-Baynes edition, with Jung's foreword

Quote, The Wilhelm-Baynes edition, with Jung's foreword

The philosophical and psychological framing familiar in the West comes from this edition, not from the Zhou Yi.

View the Source

Mawangdui silk manuscripts of the Laozi

Laozi (attributed), Ballantine Books, 1989The Mawangdui find of 1973

Quote, The Mawangdui find of 1973

The Mawangdui tomb also yielded a Book of Changes manuscript with a different hexagram order, evidence that the tradition was more various than the received canon.

View the Source

Essays About This Entity (1 essay)

The I Ching Does Three Different Jobs for Three Different Religions
One text; three religions counted, each putting it to a genuinely different use

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