The I Ching: Divination by the Book of Changes

7 July 2026

The I Ching, the Book of Changes, is the oldest divinatory system in continuous documented use on earth, and the only one to have served, for two millennia, as a canonical scripture of a great civilization's official learning. Its core is a set of sixty-four hexagrams, figures of six broken or unbroken lines, with attached oracular texts: the hexagram and line statements, which Chinese tradition ascribes to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou (c. 1000 BC), and the "Ten Wings" of commentary ascribed, mostly wrongly, to Confucius. Modern scholarship, working from oracle-bone archaeology and philology, reads the earliest stratum as a Western Zhou diviner's manual whose cryptic images, "the wild goose gradually draws near the shore," accreted philosophy around themselves for a thousand years until the divination handbook had become a cosmology of change itself.

The method

Classical consultation used fifty yarrow stalks, sorted through a repeated dividing procedure that generates each line from the bottom up, with probabilities weighted toward stability; the quicker three-coin method, standard since the Tang, flattens those probabilities but preserves the structure. Either way the mechanics produce something the Western systems treated on this site mostly do not: moving lines, lines in transition, which point from the cast hexagram to a second, so that the answer is not a state but a trajectory. The querent reads the judgment, the image, and the texts of the moving lines, and the tradition is unanimous with the advice this site gives for cartomancy: the discipline is in the question asked and the record kept.

The Western career

Europe met the book through Jesuit missionaries; Leibniz famously recognized binary arithmetic in the hexagram sequence in 1703 and took it as confirmation of a universal characteristic. The modern Western career begins with Richard Wilhelm's German translation (1924), Englished by Cary Baynes in 1950 with a foreword by C. G. Jung that introduced, through the I Ching, his concept of synchronicity: meaningful coincidence as an acausal ordering principle, the psyche and the fall of the coins participating in one moment. The book then became a fixture of the counterculture and, through it, of the occult revival; the chaos current respects it as the supreme example of a divination system whose randomizer is fully specified and whose literature is genuinely great. Scholarly translations since, Lynn's, Rutt's oracle-bone-era reconstruction, Redmond's, let the modern reader hold both books at once: the Bronze Age diviner's manual and the Song philosopher's cosmos.

Using it well

Practitioners from any Western current can adopt the Changes without trespass; it has been world property for centuries, published, taught, and offered outward by its own tradition. The craft advice condenses to three points. Ask real questions, at the moment of genuine uncertainty, not for entertainment; the classical texts are stern about frivolous consultation. Read whole: judgment, image, moving lines, and the arrived-at second hexagram, resisting the urge to cherry-pick the flattering clause. And keep the ledger, as with every practice this site discusses; the Changes, being a book about time, rewards nothing so much as being consulted across it.