I-Ching Bot

The Eight Trigrams

Every hexagram on this site is drawn as two three-line figures and captioned with their names — Heaven over Wind. This page is what those figures are.

What a trigram is

A trigram is three stacked lines. Each line is either solid (yang) or broken in the middle (yin), and three slots with two states each gives 23 = 8 figures. That is the whole set: eight, no more, and all eight are already named on this site — they are the pair of symbols printed under the number at the top of every hexagram page.

Lines are counted from the bottom up, so a hexagram’s six lines split into two trigrams: lines 1–3 are the lower trigram, lines 4–6 the upper one. Each trigram is read bottom to top as well. The caption on a hexagram page names the upper figure first — “Heaven over Wind” means Heaven sitting on top of Wind — because that describes the stack as you see it, not the order the lines were built in.

Eight possible lower figures times eight possible upper figures is 64 ordered pairs, and 64 is exactly the number of hexagrams. The book’s 64 chapters are every way of stacking two trigrams, with none missing and none repeated. That is checked here rather than asserted: across the 64 hexagram pages on this site no pair occurs twice, and each of the eight figures turns up as the upper trigram of exactly 8 hexagrams and as the lower trigram of exactly 8.

The eight figures

In the order of their Unicode codepoints, U+2630 to U+2637, which is also plain binary counting: read the three lines as digits, a solid line 0 and a broken line 1, with the top line as the last digit, and Heaven (000) counts up to Earth (111). That counting takes a solid line as 0. The Fu Xi diagram sent to Leibniz takes a solid line as 1, and lays all 64 hexagrams out as 0 to 63: the binary sequence. The glyph in each card is the character the hexagram pages themselves print, and the name is the one those pages carry in their own markup.

Nothing in those eight cards is typed by hand. The glyphs, the names, the line patterns and the two counts are read back out of the 64 hexagram pages, and a test in this site’s own suite re-reads them on every run and fails if this page and those pages ever disagree about a glyph, a name or a line.

Reading a hexagram as two trigrams

Once you can name the two halves, a hexagram stops being six anonymous lines and becomes a pair you can compare with other pairs. Here is the whole move on one real figure.

Worked example: hexagram 11

Open hexagram 11, Tài — Peace. Under the number sit two figures, ☷ on top and ☰ underneath, captioned Earth over Heaven. Unstack it from the bottom: the lower trigram is Heaven, three solid lines, so lines 1, 2 and 3 are solid; the upper trigram is Earth, three broken lines, so lines 4, 5 and 6 are broken. Three solid lines under three broken ones — which is the figure ䷊, and the same six lines the Oracle would hand you if you threw 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 8 from the bottom.

Now turn the stack over. Hexagram 12, Pǐ — Standstill is the same two figures in the other order, Heaven over Earth (䷋), and it is a different hexagram with its own text, its own six line entries and its own number. The order is part of the figure: “Earth and Heaven” is not a hexagram, “Earth over Heaven” is.

The check works on any of the 64. The two glyphs are under the hexagram number on every page, the caption always reads upper over lower, and the lower one is the bottom half of the six lines you threw.

What this page does not tell you

It describes structure, and structure is all it can settle. What a particular stacking means is text rather than arithmetic, and that text is on the hexagram’s own page: the prose on all 64 pages here is this site’s own modern interpretation rather than a translation of the classical Wilhelm or Legge editions — About says so and says where it stands. Nothing on this page is a prediction, and no arrangement of lines is claimed to cause or foretell anything.

The eight English names in those cards are the names this site’s own pages use, and they deliberately do not line up with the hexagram names: ☰ doubled is hexagram 1, called The Creative rather than “Heaven”, and ☴ doubled is hexagram 57, The Gentle rather than “Wind”. If a name you meet elsewhere for one of these figures does not match, compare the line patterns instead: the three lines are the part that cannot be worded differently, which is why every card prints them.

Where to go next

All 64 hexagrams are listed on one page, each tile showing the full six-line figure; every hexagram page then names its own two trigrams at the top. Their numbering is the King Wen order, which runs in 32 pairs; the King Wen sequence draws every pair and shows the one rule linking its two figures. Consult the Oracle to cast a reading and get one of the 64 with its moving lines, or read About for what the texts on this site are and are not.