🔮 Consult the Oracle
Still your mind, hold your question, and let coins or yarrow stalks choose your hexagram.
Three coins thrown together for each of the six lines. Fast, and the method almost every modern edition of the book describes.
Kept readings
What a reading here actually is
A cast hands you six lines, one hexagram and sometimes a second one. This is what each of those parts is, in the order the throw produces them. None of it needs JavaScript and none of it changes between visits — it is the same explanation whatever the coins do.
Six lines, numbered from the bottom
A hexagram is six stacked lines, each one either solid (yang) or broken in the middle (yin). Six positions with two states each gives 26 = 64 arrangements, and those 64 are the whole book. The lines are built and numbered from the bottom up: line 1 is the bottom line, line 6 the top. The panel a cast draws prints them the other way round, line 6 first, because that is how a hexagram is written down. So the row at the foot of that list is line 1 — the first line of your reading, not the last.
What makes a line moving
Each line is thrown on its own and comes out as a number: 6, 7, 8 or 9. Three coins are thrown together, the yang face counting 3 and the yin face 2, so the three add to one of those four totals; the yarrow method counts 3 or 2 per round across three rounds and lands in the same range. A 7 is young yang (solid) and an 8 is young yin (broken): those two simply sit there. A 6 or a 9 is a moving line, tagged changes in the panel, because 6 and 9 are the only totals you can reach when all three coins — or all three rounds of stalks — agree. A 9 is a solid line that is moving; a 6 is a broken one. With coins that is a 1-in-4 chance per line, and a moving yin is exactly as likely as a moving yang. Yarrow holds the same 1-in-4 overall but skews it: a moving yang comes up about three times as often as a moving yin. How to cast with coins or yarrow stalks walks through both methods by hand and works out those odds.
When more than one line moves, which texts to read is a matter of convention: how to read changing lines sets out the classical rule for none, one and up to six moving lines, with a worked example for each.
The second hexagram, and where it comes from
A moving line is read as a line already turning into its opposite. Take the six totals, flip every 6 and every 9 — solid becomes broken, broken becomes solid — and leave every 7 and 8 exactly where it is. The six lines now spell a different hexagram, and that is the second card, the one headed Changes into. If nothing totalled 6 or 9 then nothing flips and there is no second hexagram; that is a finished reading, not a failure.
Worked example: hexagram 11, one line moving
Say the six totals come out 7, 7, 9, 8, 8, 8, reading from the bottom. Three solid lines under three broken ones is hexagram 11, Tài — Peace (䷊). Only the third total is a 9, so line 3, third from the bottom, is the single moving line.
Flip that one line and nothing else. Solid becomes broken, the totals settle to 7, 7, 8, 8, 8, 8, and now two solid lines sit under four broken ones: hexagram 19, Lín — Approach (䷒). The reading is hexagram 11 with its third line moving, changing into hexagram 19.
What you actually read, then, is hexagram 11’s whole-figure text, then its line 3 — headed “The Threshold” on that page — and then hexagram 19’s whole-figure text. The other five lines of hexagram 11 are not part of this reading, and neither are any of hexagram 19’s.
Whole-figure text versus line text
Every hexagram page here carries both kinds, and they answer different questions. The sections headed The Oracle Speaks and The Image describe the figure as a whole and read the same for everyone who casts it; they stand where the classical book puts the Judgment, a statement about the hexagram itself, and the Image, a picture of it read off the two three-line trigrams it is stacked from. Under The Six Lines sit six shorter, separate texts, one per position, each with a When Changing note. Those are position-specific, and only the ones that moved belong to your reading. Stated plainly: the prose on all 64 pages is this site’s own modern interpretation rather than a translation of the Legge or Wilhelm editions — About says so and says where it stands.
A reading is a text you interpret
The throw does exactly one thing: it picks which of the 64 texts you read. It is not a forecast, and nothing on this site claims it is one. You never type your question — there is no box for it and the page cannot see it — so no part of the result is fitted to you or to your situation. Connecting the text to the thing you were actually holding in mind is the reader’s work, and in this tradition that interpretation is the reading. Read the hexagram you cast, read the lines that moved, read what it changes into, and decide what, if anything, it says.
Where to go next
All 64 hexagrams are listed on one page, if you would rather look a figure up than cast for it. Each hexagram page carries its whole-figure text, its six line texts with their changing notes, and a control for ticking lines to see which hexagram they change into. After a cast, the two cards above link straight to the hexagram you drew and the one it becomes.