The Creative

The judgement of the first hexagram is four Chinese characters: yuan heng li zhen. Almost everything that divides translations of the I Ching can be demonstrated on those four words.

The Ten Wings, the philosophical commentaries appended to the text centuries after its core was composed, read them as four qualities: sublimity, success, furthering and perseverance, four cardinal virtues of the creative principle. Richard Wilhelm's German version of 1924, and the Cary Baynes English translation of 1950 that carries it to most readers, follows that reading, and it is why the hexagram arrives in English as a statement about moral character.

Read as Bronze Age divination language, the same four words say something much flatter and more technical: a primary offering, and a favourable augury. Yuan is primary or great, heng is the sacrificial offering, li is advantageous, zhen is the act of divining itself. On this reading the judgement is not describing the creative power of heaven; it is recording that a large sacrifice was made and the crack in the bone read well. Richard Rutt's 1996 translation takes this line deliberately, stripping the commentarial layer away to show what the oldest stratum actually says.

Neither reading is a distortion. They are readings of different layers of a text that was assembled over centuries, and the honest position is that both are present in the book. What is not defensible is quoting the Wilhelm rendering as though it were what the Zhou diviners wrote.

The six line texts of the first hexagram track a dragon: hidden and not to be used, appearing in the field, active and wary at nightfall, wavering over the deep, flying in the sky, and finally arrogant, with cause for regret. That progression from concealment to overreach is one of the most economical things in the book, and it is the reason this hexagram is so often used to teach the whole system.

It also carries something almost unique. Hexagrams 1 and 2 have a seventh statement, "use nine" for this hexagram, "use six" for the second, which belongs to no individual line. What it is for has been argued over for two thousand years. The usual explanation is that it applies when every line of the reading is a changing line, so that the whole figure transforms into its opposite; other readings take it as a general remark about the hexagram's nature. The text does not say, and no early source settles it.

Wilhelm renders it as a flight of dragons without heads, an image of strength that does not insist on leading. Legge, in 1882, handles it more cautiously and flags the difficulty. Rutt treats it as a technical divination note. That spread of treatments over a single short phrase is a fair sample of what reading this book actually involves.

The practical lesson the dragon sequence teaches is about timing: the same force is right at one stage and disastrous at another, and nothing in the hexagram is good or bad independent of where in its course it is caught. That principle governs the whole book, and this is where it is stated most legibly.

Most popular accounts of the I Ching describe sixty-four hexagrams and stop, which makes it a book of sixty-four fortunes. That is not what it is. The mechanism that makes it a system is the changing line.

A consultation produces six lines, one at a time, and each line comes out in one of four states: young yin, young yang, old yin or old yang. Young lines are stable. Old lines are changing, they are read in their current form and then flip to their opposite, producing a second hexagram. A reading is therefore normally two figures and a movement between them: a situation, and what it is turning into. The texts of the changing lines are the specific advice; the two hexagrams are the frame.

The method matters, and this is where most modern practice quietly departs from the old one. The yarrow stalk procedure, the older method, does not produce the four line states with equal likelihood: old yang comes up markedly less often than old yin, and the whole distribution is lopsided. The three-coin method, which is faster and now far more common, makes changing lines of both kinds equally probable. The two methods therefore ask different questions of chance, and a book of readings compiled under one does not straightforwardly apply under the other. This is a real and under-discussed difference, not a scruple.

There is also no agreed rule for what to do when several lines change. Various conventions exist, read the lowest, read the highest, read them all, read only the second hexagram, and they descend from different commentators. The earliest records of consultations do not use a single system either.