What is the Yijing

Origins — three sages, three ancient ages

Not one person writing once. The old saying: rén gèng sān shèng, shì lì sān gǔ — it passed through three sages, across three ages. Like a house raised over generations: one lays the foundation, one raises the pillars, one roofs the house.

Tradition and scholarship

The Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) tells that Confucius in old age loved the Yi so much that the leather thong binding his bamboo slips broke three times. The image says: even a sage must read long; from that very reading came the Ten Wings.

Modern scholars doubt many layers. Fu Xi is a legendary figure. The Hanshu (Book of Han) names three sages, yet implies the 64 hexagrams arose before the Eight Trigrams, not the reverse. Ouyang Xiu of the Song already held that the Ten Wings was almost certainly not Confucius’s own hand. The Zhou Yi manuscript from Mawangdui (1973) orders the hexagrams differently from the received text — compilation is more complex than four sages writing in sequence.

From a diviner’s handbook to a cosmology

At first the Yi was a handbook for deciding affairs: going to war, marriage, the harvest. Concrete, not yet a cosmology.

The turning point is the Commentaries (Zhuan) of the Warring States. The Xici zhuan (Great Commentary) writes: Yi has the Supreme Ultimate, which gives rise to the Two Modes, the Two Modes give rise to the Four Images, the Four Images give rise to the Eight Trigrams — East Asia’s formula of creation: from chaos, the ten thousand things divide.

In the Han, Emperor Wu placed the Yi among the Five Classics, at the head — first among the classics. From then on the Yi was the intellectual ground for philosophy, medicine, astronomy, law, and occult learning.

In the same age, Pythagoras in the West said all things are number. The Yi uses yin and yang; Greece uses number. The two streams did not know each other until the seventeenth century, when Jesuit missionaries carried the Yi to Europe.

The name — one character Yi, three meanings

The Shuowen (Explaining Graphs) explains the character Yi as the image of a lizard changing color. In practice one character carries three meanings — the Three Yi.

Jing originally means the warp on a loom: the warp holds still, the weft changes the pattern. Jing implies a law that does not grow old.

It is also called the Zhou Yi: Zhou as the Zhou house (the classic completed in the Zhou), or Zhou as a complete cycle. Tradition names the Lianshan (Xia) and the Guizang (Shang) — both lost. The West calls it I Ching / Yijing: Book of Changes.

Structure — the Classic (Kinh) and the Commentaries

Like statute and case law. The Classic is the core text; the Commentaries are how it is read. They were first separate; only in the Han were they joined. The editions in common use: commentaries by Wang Bi (third century) and Zhu Xi (twelfth century).

The Classic (Kinh)

Sixty-four hexagrams. Each hexagram: a name; the Judgment — the text of the whole figure, ascribed to King Wen; the Line Statements — the text of each line, ascribed to the Duke of Zhou. Qian and Kun add the Use of Nines and the Use of Sixes.

The Ten Wings

Ten essays that lift the Yi from a diviner’s handbook into a cosmology. Like ten wings that let the classic fly.

The Three Yi — three principles in one character

Change — nothing stands still

Spring becomes summer, fullness becomes decline. One yang line turning yin (or the reverse) changes the hexagram — a moving line. 64 hexagrams × 6 lines = 384 paths of change. Yin at its extreme gives birth to yang; yang at its extreme gives birth to yin.

Constancy — the manner of change does not reverse

Spring always follows winter. Each wave is different, yet rise then fall is the law. The Yi seeks what does not change, hidden inside what is changing.

Simplicity — complexity reduced to two strokes

Yin and yang. From them, four images, eight trigrams, sixty-four hexagrams, 384 lines. Leibniz saw an equivalent of binary notation (1703) when reading Bouvet’s Latin version — intriguing, yet the Yi is a philosophical symbol-system, not a mathematical counting system.

The Eight Trigrams — the eight letters of the Yi

Eight trigrams, three lines each. Two trigrams (upper + lower) combine into 64 hexagrams. Directions below follow the Later Heaven arrangement — the one Liu Yao uses when placing directions.

The sixty-four hexagrams

Eight times eight = sixty-four situations. Qian is pure yang, Kun pure yin; sixty-two hexagrams mix between them. Qian and Kun are the gate of the Yi. The Judgment of Qian: Yuan Heng Li Zhen — a great beginning, free passage, fitness, lasting correctness.

Reading a hexagram is not looking up 64 fixed sentences. Each line may move or not: 64 × 64 = 4,096 combinations of the original hexagram and the changed hexagram. The same figure, a different question, a different wording — it must be read in motion.

Divining with the Yi — methods of casting, and this app’s method

The principle: generate chance (coins, yarrow, numbers) to produce a hexagram; the hexagram reflects the state at the moment of asking; read the hexagram and line texts to see the direction of change. The Yi does not believe in pure chance. The Xici zhuan says: gǎn ér suì tōng tiānxià zhī gù — in the instant of the cast, the “random” number is the qi of that exact moment. The app calls this heaven-and-human resonance, at the stirring of the mind.

In the app: Automatic hexagram = three coins, six times from the bottom up. Plum Blossom hexagram = lunar year, month, day, and hour numbers. Serial / phone hexagram = sum grouped digits, divide by 8 for upper and lower trigrams, divide by 6 for the moving line. Enter a hexagram = fill in six already-cast lines. All four assign stems and branches and place the Six Relatives — that is Liu Yao, not merely reading the Judgment.

Where it is used

The Yi is the “mathematics” of East Asian occult learning: the Eight Trigrams for feng shui (Eight Mansions, Flying Stars); yin-yang, the Five Phases, and stems and branches for BaZi and Zi Wei Dou Shu; Qi Men · Liu Ren · Tai Yi use trigrams, stems and branches, and the nine palaces. Jung wrote the foreword to the Wilhelm–Baynes edition (1950): the Yi illustrates synchronicity — a meaningful coincidence between inner and outer.

Four common misunderstandings

It is not only a book of superstition

It began as divination; three thousand years later it is also philosophy. Equating the Yi with “superstitious fortune-telling” is like equating astronomy with astrology — same root, already branched. The divinatory part has not been proven in a laboratory; change, yin-yang, and the binary structure still occupy scholars.

It is not 64 closed answers

Six lines, each moving or not, times 64 changed hexagrams. Then it must be read against the matter being asked. The answer is almost without a floor.

Confucius did not write the Classic

The Classic existed at least five hundred years before him. He (or his disciples) wrote the Commentaries. Even of the Commentaries, Ouyang Xiu already doubted. He remains the one who raised the Yi from a diviner’s handbook to a classic.

The Eight Trigrams are not yet the whole Yijing

The eight trigrams are the alphabet. The Classic still has 64 hexagrams, 384 line texts, the Ten Wings, and the Three Yi. Liu Yao adds a stem-branch layer — a stem and branch on each line — which the Eight Trigrams alone do not contain.

Quick questions

What is the Yijing, in brief?

East Asia’s oldest classic of the law of change. 64 hexagrams, each of six yin-yang lines. First for divination; later a cosmology. Yi = change; Jing = the book that holds the law.

How many hexagrams are there?

Eight trigrams × eight = 64 hexagrams. Each has six line texts, plus the Use of Nines and the Use of Sixes on Qian and Kun. The app interprets by lines already assigned stems and branches, and does not stop at the hexagram’s name.

Who wrote it?

Tradition: Fu Xi, King Wen, the Duke of Zhou, Confucius. Scholarship: a collective work, roughly the eleventh to third centuries BCE.

What are the Three Yi?

Three senses of the character Yi: change — all things transform; constancy — the law of change does not reverse; simplicity — complexity returns to yin and yang.

Where should study begin?

Yin-yang → Eight Trigrams → the Five Phases → read Qian, Kun, and the Xici zhuan → then actually cast. In the app: the Study tab walks through Liu Yao terms (Six Relatives, Self and Response lines, Useful God); this page is the gate of the Yi.

How does it differ from Kiều divination or Tarot?

The Yi has a philosophical spine: the Three Yi, yin-yang, the Five Phases, and line-change with rules. Kiều draws on verse; Tarot draws on 78 pictorial cards. One side is philosophical divination; the other is an art of divination.

How does Liu Yao differ from reading the 64 hexagrams as text?

Reading the classic: Judgment, Line Statements, Tuan, Xiang. Liu Yao: assign stems and branches to the six lines, place the Six Relatives, take the Self and Response lines, choose the Useful God by the question, then weigh the month branch, the day branch, and void — Zeng Shan Bu Yi (Augmented Divination of Shan). Same Yi root, a different layer of interpretation.