Your Birth Hexagram

The I Ching is a consulted oracle. You ask it a question and you cast an answer. In three thousand years of use it has never had a birth chart. There is no ancient method for taking a date of birth and turning it into a hexagram, the way Western astrology turns a date, a time and a place into a chart, or the way numerology turns a birth date into a Life Path. Anyone who tells you otherwise has read a different history from the one I have.

Where birth hexagrams come from

Birth hexagrams are a modern idea, and there are several ways of arriving at one. The simplest adds the digits of the birth date together and reduces the total until it lands between 1 and 64. Another counts the day of the year and maps that number onto the sixty four. A third, and the most elaborate, works from the Chinese calendar and the hour of birth, building a lower trigram from one part of the birth data and an upper trigram from another, and then reading the hexagram they make. The Chinese Calendar and the New Year page covers that calendar if you want to see what the third method is working from.

These methods do not agree with each other. Run the same birth date through all three and you will usually get three different hexagrams. That is the plain fact of it, and it is why I will not call any one of them the ancient or the only method. I have chosen one to work with, and I say which and why further down, so that you can see the choice for what it is.

I want to be clear that this is a different situation from, say, the disagreement between tropical and sidereal astrology, where two schools measure the same sky from two different starting points and each has centuries of practice behind it. Here we have a handful of recent inventions reaching for a book that was never built for the purpose. Some of them are thoughtful, and all of them are new.

Why the calculator does not give one

The Find Your Numbers and Signs calculator on this site gives you your Life Path, your Sun sign, your Chinese animal and a good deal else, and each of those rests on a method I can show you and defend. It does not give you a birth hexagram. The method I use needs your birth date on the Chinese calendar and your hour of birth, and the calculator works from the Western date alone, which is enough for the digit methods and I will not put one of those in front of you as your hexagram. If a calculator somewhere else gives you one, ask which method it used, and if it cannot tell you, treat the result as a conversation starter and nothing more.

What I do with one

Having said all that, I do look at a birth hexagram in a full portrait, and here is how.

Of the three, the one I now use for a portrait is the third, the one built from the Chinese calendar and the hour of birth. It is the only one that builds a real hexagram, two trigrams with a moving line, and the moving line gives a second figure, where the energy is heading, which the digit methods cannot do. It has a lineage too, in the old Chinese practice of casting a hexagram from the date and hour of the moment a question is asked. Pointing that practice at the moment of birth is the modern step, and it is a small one, so if you ask me where the method comes from I have an answer. The catch is the hour. Without a birth time the lower trigram and the moving line cannot be fixed, so if you do not know yours I say so on the page and read from the day alone, and I will ask you for the time before I guess at it. I still work the two digit methods beside it and show all the working, and when two of the three land on the same hexagram I take note, because that is more than chance and it earns the figure a closer look.

Whatever comes out, I treat it as a picture of a temperament, something to hold up against the rest of the chart and see whether it rhymes. If your numerology says you are a builder and your Western chart says you are a builder and the birth hexagram comes up as Hexagram 26, Great Taming, Mountain over Heaven, strength held in check and put to work, then I have three systems saying one thing, and that is worth telling you. If the hexagram says something the rest of the chart does not, I tell you that too, and I let you decide whether it fits. A birth hexagram in my hands is one more voice at the table.

What it is never, under any method, is a verdict. The book describes the shape of a situation and how to stand in it, and as a birth figure it describes a shape you may find you keep standing in. That is useful, and it leaves what happens next in your hands.

Reading your own

If you do have a birth hexagram, from a portrait or from a method you have worked yourself, every one of the sixty four pages in The Hexagrams has a section called As a birth hexagram. It describes the person who carries that figure, their signature, their gift, their shadow and what they look like grown into themselves. I wrote those sections with two readers in mind: the person whose portrait gave them that hexagram, and the person who worked out nothing from a date and keeps casting the same figure over and over for different questions. In my experience the second reader has the better claim on it. A hexagram that comes back to you four times in a year is telling you something a formula cannot.

Read your figure's page, read its pair, and notice what fits and what does not. Then put it beside your Life Path and your Sun sign and see whether the three are describing the same person. When they are, you have learnt something about yourself. When they are not, you have learnt something about the methods.

The simplest way to meet the book

Cast it.

I know that is not the answer people come to this page for. They want a number from a date, the way they got one from numerology, and I understand the wish. But the I Ching gives up its best to the person who asks it a real question, and it has done so for three thousand years without needing anyone's date of birth.

So write down something you are actually facing. Find three coins. How to Cast a Hexagram will take you through the throws and the moving lines, and The Eight Trigrams will show you how to read the picture you get. Do that a dozen times over a few months, keep the notebook, and you will know which hexagrams are yours far better than any formula could tell you. The book will have shown you, which is how it has always worked.

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