Learn the I Ching

The four guides

These are the long pages. Each carries its sources at the foot and a short set of questions readers ask, and they link on to each other in the order below.

• What is the I Ching

  Covers the title 易經 character by character, why the count of figures comes out at exactly 64, and what a reading is understood to be for. Start here if the book is new to you.

• History of the I Ching

  The book came together in layers, and this one follows them: the Zhouyi core, the attributions to Fu Xi, King Wen, the Duke of Zhou and Confucius, the Ten Wings, the dynastic commentaries, and the route west from Jesuit scholarship to Legge in 1882 and the Wilhelm and Baynes edition of 1950.

• How to consult the I Ching

  Three coins, tossed six times, with the first toss giving the bottom line. The page lists what each of the four totals means, works one cast all the way through to a resulting hexagram, and says what to do when more than one line changes.

• How the I Ching hexagrams work

  Structure: which position is which, how six lines split into a lower and an upper trigram, what a changing line does, and what comes out when a figure is turned upside down or has every line swapped. It also introduces the eight trigrams as a set.

The eight trigrams

Every hexagram is two trigrams stacked, one below and one above, so these eight three-line figures are what the 64 are built from. The fourth guide introduces them together. Each page here takes one on its own: it draws the figure, gives the associations traditionally attached to it, and lists the fifteen hexagrams that contain it, split by whether the trigram sits in the lower half or the upper.

• ☰ Qián · Heaven

  Three solid lines, with nothing in the figure that yields. Fifteen hexagrams contain it, and hexagram 1 is Qián twice.

• ☷ Kūn · Earth

  The exact reverse of Qián, line for line.

• ☳ Zhèn · Thunder

  Six of the eight trigrams are told apart by where their single odd line falls. Zhèn's sits lowest, and the page explains what the traditional readings make of that.

• ☵ Kǎn · Water

  Turning it over changes nothing, which is true of only four of the eight. Danger and depth are the qualities traditionally attached to it.

• ☶ Gèn · Mountain

  What happens to Zhèn when you turn it upside down: the same solid line, arrived at the top.

• ☴ Xùn · Wind/Wood

  Two images sit on one figure here, which is why the trigram carries two English names.

• ☲ Lí · Fire

  Solid outside, empty in the middle. Together with Kǎn it makes hexagrams 63 and 64, the last two in the sequence.

• ☱ Duì · Lake

  Open at the top where Gèn is closed. The page gives the traditional associations and the fifteen hexagrams built from it.

All 64 hexagrams

The catalogue is the reference end of the site, and every individual hexagram page is reached from it.

• All 64 hexagrams

  All 64 in the received King Wen order, with the number, English title, Chinese name and pinyin on every card, and a search box that takes any one of those.

Hexagram pages name the two trigrams they are built from, and the trigram pages list the hexagrams back. Fifteen figures share a hexagram's lower trigram and fifteen share its upper, so any hexagram is one click from its two trigrams and two from the others that share either one.