Consult the I Ching
Write your question, cast a hexagram, find it in the table, read the judgment and the moving lines, change the moving lines to obtain the resulting hexagram, and read its judgment. Every step follows the traditional rules, and you leave with questions you can take into the meeting room.
- Ask
- Cast
- Find
- Read
- Change
- Resulting
- Reflect
1. State your question
One matter at a time. An open question ("What do I need to understand about…?") works better than a yes/no one. Note the time frame, and what you were going to do anyway.
What were you going to do anyway? (optional, kept on this device)
2. Cast the hexagram
The six lines are built from the bottom up. Each line takes a value of six, seven, eight or nine: seven and nine are yang, six and eight are yin; six and nine are "old" lines, and they change.
The most common method. Heads count three, tails two; add the three coins.
The fifty-stalk procedure of the Great Commentary, three operations per line; its probabilities differ from the coins.
You have cast with real coins or stalks: enter the six values from the bottom up.
Plum-blossom style: each number gives a trigram (Earlier Heaven numbers, remainder of division by eight); their sum divided by six gives the moving line.
Choose six values from the first line (bottom) to the sixth (top).
3. Find it: upper trigram, then lower trigram
In the finding list, rows are the upper trigram and columns the lower trigram; the cell where they meet gives the number of the primary hexagram.
5. The moving lines
6. The resulting hexagram
Principal text (Zhu Xi's rules)
Three further aspects
7. Reading and reflection
The engine assembles the text below from the judgment, the line texts and Zhu Xi's rules. It is a structured draft for reflection, not a forecast.
Related situations in the library
Questions to take away
Written reflection by AI (optional)
A cloud language model writes a reflection from your question and the texts. It can be wrong; do not use it for medical, legal, financial or psychological decisions. Your question is sent to the server for processing but is not stored by us.
A consultation is a structured method of reflection based on classical Chinese texts. It is not a prediction, and it is not psychological, medical, legal, tax or investment advice. Do not base a decision on it alone: the decision and its responsibility remain yours.