The I Ching, or Yijing, the Book of Changes, is read as a situational oracle rather than a portrait of character. Sixty four hexagrams, each a six line figure built by stacking two of the eight trigrams, stand for sixty four kinds of moment, and a reading names which one a question or a birth falls under and what it favors right now, not what a person is.

History

The text is layered. Its oldest stratum, the hexagram and line statements themselves, is traditionally placed in the early Western Zhou dynasty, associated in legend with King Wen of Zhou and his son the Duke of Zhou, and grew out of an older tradition of divination by cracking heated turtle shells and ox bones that Shang dynasty diviners had already practiced for centuries. The trigrams underneath the hexagrams are traditionally credited to the legendary sage Fu Xi.

A second layer, the Ten Wings, a set of philosophical commentaries reading ethical and cosmological meaning into the line statements, was traditionally attributed to Confucius; modern textual scholarship instead places most of the Ten Wings in the Warring States period and the Han dynasty, several centuries after Confucius's own lifetime, written by unnamed compilers working in his tradition rather than by the man himself. It was this commentary layer that turned a divination manual into a core text of Confucian and later Daoist philosophy, studied at the Han imperial court alongside the other Five Classics.

The most influential early philosophical reading is Wang Bi's commentary from the third century CE, which stripped away much of the numerological apparatus earlier Han scholars had built around the text and read it instead through the abstract principle of change itself, a reading that shaped how the book was studied for the next thousand years. The text reached the West gradually through Jesuit missionary reports from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but its wide modern readership dates to the German sinologist Richard Wilhelm's translation, published in 1923, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes in 1950 with a foreword by the psychologist Carl Jung, who read the book's method as an illustration of his own concept of synchronicity. That translation, more than any earlier one, is what carried the I Ching into twentieth century Western esoteric and countercultural use.

The Eight Trigrams

Every hexagram is two trigrams, one on top of the other, and every trigram is three stacked lines, each either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang). Eight possible three line combinations exist, the bagua, each standing for a natural force and carrying its own element and compass direction: Qian (heaven), Dui (lake), Li (fire), Zhen (thunder), Xun (wind), Kan (water), Gen (mountain) and Kun (earth). The same eight trigrams underlie Chinese astrology's own cosmology of element and direction, described in full on that report item's page.

Four Hexagrams, As An Example

Sixty four hexagrams cover every pairing of the eight trigrams with itself and each other. Four illustrate the range: Qian doubled is The Creative, pure unbroken yang; Kun doubled is The Receptive, pure broken yin; Earth over Heaven is Peace, a hexagram read as harmony; and Fire over Water is Before Completion, the last hexagram in the traditional sequence, read as a threshold not yet crossed.

How A Reading Is Constructed

Traditionally a hexagram is cast by one of two methods: the older and slower yarrow stalk method, a multi step count through forty nine stalks that produces one line at a time, or the later three coin method, which reads the pattern of heads and tails across three tosses per line, six tosses in all. This report item works from birth data instead, deriving the trigrams a chart indicates rather than casting a fresh oracle for a single question, and reads their pairing as a situational statement, what a moment favors, in keeping with the book's own character as an oracle of circumstance rather than of fixed personality.

Certain lines, called moving lines, are read as unstable, on the point of flipping from yin to yang or back, which changes the cast hexagram into a second, related one; a full traditional reading considers both the situation as cast and the situation it is moving toward.

Where To Read More

• QianQian, heaven, pure yang.
• DuiDui, lake.
• LiLi, fire.
• ZhenZhen, thunder.
• XunXun, wind.
• KanKan, water.
• GenGen, mountain.
• KunKun, earth, pure yin.
• The CreativeQianThe Creative, Qian doubled, pure unbroken yang.
• The ReceptiveKunThe Receptive, Kun doubled, pure broken yin.
• PeaceTaiPeace, earth over heaven, read as harmony.
• Before CompletionWei JiBefore Completion, fire over water, the traditional sequence's last hexagram, a threshold not yet crossed.