The 64 Hexagrams
Original interpretations — oracle message, six lines, imagery, timing & daily practice. Every figure below is two three-line trigrams stacked. Cast with several moving lines? How to read changing lines says which text to read. Why this order? The King Wen sequence pairs them two by two. Read as binary numbers, the same 64 are on the Fu Xi sequence.
Threw the coins or the stalks yourself? Find your hexagram
Type the six values you threw, bottom line first. With three coins each line is the total of heads counted as 3 and tails as 2; yarrow stalks give the same four numbers. How to cast with coins or stalks walks through both methods. Nothing to submit — the hexagram resolves as you type.
← line 1, thrown firstline 6, thrown last →
6 is old yin, 7 young yang, 8 young yin, 9 old yang — a 6 or a 9 is a moving line.
Fill all six boxes to see your hexagram.
Find a hexagram by its two trigrams
Every hexagram is a lower three-line figure with an upper one on top, so this is the key printed at the back of Legge’s and Wilhelm’s editions: pick the upper trigram along the top, the lower trigram down the side, and the hexagram sits where they cross. Not sure which figure is which? The eight trigrams, line by line.
| Upper → Lower ↓ | Heaven | Thunder | Water | Mountain | Earth | Wind | Fire | Lake |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heaven | 1 | 34 | 5 | 26 | 11 | 9 | 14 | 43 |
| Thunder | 25 | 51 | 3 | 27 | 24 | 42 | 21 | 17 |
| Water | 6 | 40 | 29 | 4 | 7 | 59 | 64 | 47 |
| Mountain | 33 | 62 | 39 | 52 | 15 | 53 | 56 | 31 |
| Earth | 12 | 16 | 8 | 23 | 2 | 20 | 35 | 45 |
| Wind | 44 | 32 | 48 | 18 | 46 | 57 | 50 | 28 |
| Fire | 13 | 55 | 63 | 22 | 36 | 37 | 30 | 49 |
| Lake | 10 | 54 | 60 | 41 | 19 | 61 | 38 | 58 |
Worked example: “Water over Thunder” is the Water column crossed with the Thunder row, hexagram 3. The diagonal from top-left to bottom-right holds the eight doubled trigrams (1, 51, 29, 52, 2, 57, 30, 58). The top line of a hexagram belongs to the upper trigram, so if you threw coins, your first three throws make the lower trigram and your last three the upper.