Learning the I Ching

This page is the ground floor. Where the book came from, what a hexagram actually is, how an oracle answers a question, and how I go about reading one.

Where it comes from

The I Ching is Chinese and it is old. The oldest layer of it, called the Zhou Changes, dates from the Zhou dynasty about three thousand years ago, roughly 1000 BCE. Tradition says King Wen wrote the short text that goes with each hexagram, and that his son, the Duke of Zhou, wrote the texts for the individual lines. The order the sixty four hexagrams are read in today, the same order you will find in every edition and on The Hexagrams page here, is called the King Wen sequence after him. Over the centuries that followed, a set of commentaries called the Ten Wings was added, and those are associated with the Confucian school.

It came to the West above all through one man. Richard Wilhelm, a German missionary and scholar, published his German translation in 1924, and that translation was put into English in 1950 with a foreword by Carl Jung. He used the word synchronicity for what happens when a cast answers a question, the idea that a moment has a shape and that everything falling into that moment, coins included, shares the shape. I find that a useful way to say it.

I work from translations, several of them, and I read them against each other. That is worth saying out loud.

What a hexagram is

A hexagram is a figure of six lines, stacked, read from the bottom up. Line 1 is the bottom line, line 6 is the top. Every line is either solid, which is yang, or broken in the middle, which is yin. Yang is the firm, active, outward side of anything. Yin is the yielding, receptive, inward side. They need each other the way a hinge needs both halves.

Six lines of two kinds give sixty four figures, and each one is made of two trigrams, figures of three lines, one sitting on top of the other. There are eight trigrams, Heaven, Earth, Thunder, Water, Mountain, Wind, Fire and Lake, and The Eight Trigrams page gives each one its lines and its picture. Learn those eight and the sixty four stop being a list. Hexagram 5, Waiting, is Water over Heaven, clouds gathered above the sky and the rain not yet fallen. Once you can see that, you do not need to be told what Waiting means.

The sixty four run in pairs. Hexagram 1 goes with 2, 3 with 4, and so on to 63 with 64, and in most pairs the second is the first turned upside down. Each hexagram's page names its pair.

How an oracle answers

You ask a question. You cast six lines, with coins or with yarrow stalks. You look up the hexagram you have built and you read it as the answer.

That is the whole method, and the part that takes practice is the question. A good question is about you, is about now, and asks how to stand in something, which is the question the book was written to answer. How do I approach this conversation with my brother. What is the shape of this job offer. The book is poor at yes or no and poor at other people's business. The Tarot Spreads page and the How to Read a Card page say the same thing about asking a question of the cards, and it is the same skill with either oracle.

Some lines come up as moving lines, lines in the act of turning into their opposite. A moving line points to where the situation is live, and when you turn it over you get a second hexagram, the direction the matter is heading. How to Cast a Hexagram takes one cast all the way through so you can see this done.

How I read it

I read the picture first. Two trigrams, what are they, what do they make together. Lower is the inner situation or the beginning of the matter, upper is the outer situation or where it is heading.

Then the moving line, second. One line in six is the point in the figure that is shifting, and its position tells me whether the matter is at its beginning, its heart or its end.

Then the second hexagram, third, as the direction of travel.

Only then do I open a translation. The old text is written in the language of a royal court, with princes and armies and sacrifices to ancestors, and I translate it on the spot into plain words for the person in front of me. The army is the effort you are organising. The prince is whoever holds the authority in your situation, which is sometimes you. In my experience people hear the book far better when it stops sounding like a book.

Beside the tarot

The tarot and the I Ching are two oracles, and I use them together without any trouble. The tarot speaks in pictures, seventy eight of them, rich in faces and colours and small things in the corners of a card. The I Ching speaks in lines, and it is spare. It gives you the one shape under a situation and very little decoration around it. When I want to know what is going on, I lay out cards. When I want to know how to stand in what is going on, I throw the coins.

Beside Chinese astrology

The I Ching and Chinese astrology share a vocabulary. The yin and yang in the hexagram lines are the same yin and yang that give every year of the Chinese calendar its polarity, and the Yin and Yang page explains the pair properly. They are two different tools, though. Chinese astrology reads a birth and a calendar. The I Ching reads a question and a moment. One tells you the kind of weather you were born into. The other tells you what the weather is doing this afternoon.

How this section is laid out

How to Cast a Hexagram is the practical page, three coins and a worked example. The Eight Trigrams is the page to learn by heart. Your Birth Hexagram tells you plainly what a birth hexagram is and is not, and what I do with one in a full portrait. The Hexagrams lists all sixty four in order, and each hexagram's own page covers the figure, what it says for a question, who carries it as a birth hexagram, and what a moving line does to it.

Where to start

Read The Eight Trigrams until the eight pictures are yours. Then cast. Write the question down, throw the coins, and read what you get before you read what anyone says about it. The first time the figure describes the exact corner you are standing in, you will understand why people have kept this book for three thousand years.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.