How to Cast the I Ching: Consulting the Oldest Oracle Still in Daily Use
The Oldest Oracle Still in Daily Use
Three coins, thrown six times, build a figure of broken and unbroken lines that the Chinese have consulted for some three thousand years. The I Ching does not predict so much as describe the shape of a moment and the direction it is leaning. To cast it is to step into one of the oldest unbroken conversations between a human being and chance.
The I Ching, whose name is most accurately translated as the Classic of Changes or the Book of Changes, is one of the oldest texts in the world that remains in active use. It began as a divination manual during the Western Zhou period of Chinese history and accumulated layer upon layer of philosophical commentary over the following centuries until it became one of the Five Classics of Confucianism, the foundational texts of Chinese intellectual culture, studied and revered by scholars, rulers, and ordinary people for the entirety of Chinese recorded history. It influenced the development of Taoist cosmology, Confucian ethics, and Chinese mathematical and scientific thought. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German philosopher and mathematician, saw in the I Ching's binary structure of broken and unbroken lines an anticipation of binary mathematics. Philip K. Dick used it while writing The Man in the High Castle. John Cage used it as a compositional tool, generating music through the oracle's chance operations. It is not a relic. It is a living instrument.
The dating of the I Ching requires care, because the text as we have it today is a layered document assembled over several centuries rather than a single composition. The core text, known as the Zhouyi or Changes of Zhou, is thought by modern scholars to have been compiled in its approximate current form during the late Western Zhou period, with the American sinologist Edward Shaughnessy, drawing on comparisons with dated bronze inscriptions, dating the Zhouyi to the last quarter of the ninth century BCE, during the early decades of the reign of King Xuan of Zhou. Traditional attribution credits King Wen of Zhou with arranging the sixty-four hexagrams in their current order and writing the Judgments for each, and his son the Duke of Zhou with adding the line texts, during the eleventh century BCE. These attributions are not accepted as literal historical fact by modern scholarship but reflect the genuine antiquity of the core text and the Zhou dynasty origin of the divinatory system it encodes. The philosophical commentaries known as the Ten Wings, traditionally attributed to Confucius and his school, were added during the late Warring States period or the early Han dynasty, somewhere between the fourth and second centuries BCE, transforming a divination manual into a philosophical masterpiece of the first order.
What the I Ching Actually Is
The I Ching is built on a cosmological understanding in which reality consists of the constant interplay and transformation of two complementary forces: yin and yang. Yang is active, creative, strong, initiating. Yin is receptive, yielding, nurturing, sustaining. Neither is superior to the other; both are necessary for the other to exist. The movement of the universe is the continuous transformation of yin into yang and yang back into yin, a ceaseless cycling that the I Ching maps through the language of its hexagrams.
A hexagram is a figure of six stacked horizontal lines, each line being either solid (yang) or broken with a gap at the centre (yin). There are sixty-four possible combinations of six such lines, and each of these sixty-four hexagrams represents a particular configuration of forces, a specific quality of moment, a named situation in the great cycle of change. Each hexagram is itself composed of two trigrams, three-line figures, stacked lower and upper. There are eight possible trigrams, and any two of them stacked produces one of the sixty-four hexagrams. The relationship between the lower and upper trigram, what is happening within the situation and what is the larger context or environment in which it is happening, is one of the richest sources of meaning in any hexagram reading.
The I Ching does not operate as a simple prediction system that tells you what will happen. It describes the quality and direction of the forces currently at work in a situation and indicates, through the text associated with each hexagram and each line, what attitude and what actions are likely to align or misalign with those forces. It is more like reading the weather than like reading the future: you are told what kind of conditions you are in and what they tend to produce, but the outcome depends on how you move within them. This is the understanding that the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung brought to his celebrated introduction to Richard Wilhelm's German translation, published in English by Princeton University Press in 1950, in which Jung framed the I Ching's mechanism through his concept of synchronicity, the meaningful coincidence of events that have no causal relationship but whose conjunction carries significance. Whether or not that theoretical framework satisfies, the practical reality of the I Ching's consulting process is that it requires a specific question, specific attention, and an honest willingness to read what comes rather than what is wanted.
The Eight Trigrams: The Alphabet of the Oracle
Before the hexagrams can be read, the eight trigrams need to be understood, because every hexagram is a conversation between two of them. Each trigram is a three-line figure representing a fundamental natural force, and learning to recognise their qualities gives the reader a direct felt sense of any hexagram rather than a dependence on memorised text.
Qian, Heaven (three solid lines): Pure yang, the creative force, initiative, strength, and the formless potential from which everything arises. When Qian appears in a hexagram, the energy is initiating, powerful, and demanding of sustained effort and correct conduct.
Kun, Earth (three broken lines): Pure yin, the receptive force, yielding, nurturing, sustaining. Kun does not initiate; it receives and gives form to what Qian sets in motion. When Kun appears, the energy calls for patience, support, and the following of rather than the leading of.
Zhen, Thunder (yang below two yin): The arousing force, sudden movement, shock, and the energy of new beginnings. Zhen is the crack of thunder that breaks stillness and sets things in motion, associated with the east, with spring, with the initiation of action.
Xun, Wind or Wood (yin below two yang): Penetrating, gentle, persistent. Wind does not force its way through obstacles; it finds every crack and works through them with patient consistency. Xun represents gradual influence, the power of sustained, adaptive movement over time.
Kan, Water (yang between two yin): Danger, depth, and the skill required to navigate difficult channels. Water flows through and around obstacles without ceasing; Kan represents the ability to maintain movement and direction in conditions of genuine risk, associated with the north, with winter, with the need for courage and competence rather than force.
Li, Fire (yin between two yang): Clarity, illumination, and the thing that gives light but depends for its existence on what it clings to. Fire cannot exist without fuel; Li represents awareness, perception, and the understanding that clarity depends on correct attachment. Associated with the south, with summer, with what is seen and made visible.
Gen, Mountain (yang above two yin): Stillness, stopping, rest, and the contemplative pause. Gen does not mean stagnation but the purposeful ceasing of movement in order to consolidate, reflect, and prepare. Associated with the northeast, with the youngest son in the trigram family system, with the kind of stillness that precedes renewed action.
Dui, Lake (yin above two yang): Openness, joy, communication, and the pleasure of exchange. The lake reflects the sky above it and offers its surface to the world around it; Dui represents the power of genuine delight, the capacity to find and share joy, and the risk of superficiality or excessive talk when that openness becomes indiscriminate.
The Coin Method: Step by Step
The yarrow stalk method is the oldest documented form of I Ching divination, described in classical Chinese texts and involving the manipulation of fifty dried yarrow stalks through a lengthy counting process that can take thirty minutes or more for a single hexagram. The coin method came into widespread use roughly a thousand years after the yarrow stalk method and became the dominant form of consultation because it achieves the same result in six throws. Both are legitimate. This guide teaches the coin method because it is what most people will actually use.
You need three identical coins. They do not need to be Chinese coins or coins with any special significance; three identical ordinary coins work perfectly well. The convention most widely used in English-language practice, established through Richard Wilhelm and Cary Baynes's translation, assigns the value of three to heads and the value of two to tails. Some practitioners reverse this assignment, and either approach is consistent with traditional practice provided you choose one and maintain it throughout your use of the oracle.
Before you throw: Formulate your question with care. The I Ching responds most usefully to genuine, specific questions about real situations. Vague questions produce vague responses. Questions about what is happening now, what attitude is called for, what the likely development of a situation is, and what would be wise to do are all appropriate. Yes or no questions are generally less productive than questions that invite a description of a situation's quality and direction. Hold the question clearly in mind while you hold the coins and throughout the throwing process. The quality of attention brought to the casting is part of the casting.
The throw: Shake the three coins in cupped hands and release them onto a flat surface. The total value of the three coins will always be six, seven, eight, or nine. Count: heads is three, tails is two. Three heads gives nine (3+3+3). Three tails gives six (2+2+2). Two heads and one tail gives eight (3+3+2). Two tails and one head gives seven (2+2+3). Each of these four totals corresponds to a specific type of line.
A total of seven produces a stable yang line: a solid unbroken line. Record it as a solid line. A total of eight produces a stable yin line: a broken line with a gap at its centre. Record it as a broken line. A total of nine produces a moving yang line: a solid line that is in the process of changing into its opposite. Record it as a solid line with a circle in the middle, or mark it with an O. A total of six produces a moving yin line: a broken line in the process of changing into its opposite. Record it as a broken line with an X in the middle.
Building the hexagram from the bottom up: The first throw produces the first line, at the bottom of the hexagram. The second throw produces the second line, placed immediately above the first. You continue in this way through six throws, building the hexagram from the ground upward. This is not intuitive for readers accustomed to left-to-right or top-to-bottom reading conventions, but it is the correct method and the reason for it lies in the symbolic logic of the hexagram: the bottom line represents the beginning of a situation, and the figure is read as developing and rising toward the top. Write down each line as it is produced, clearly marking any moving lines with O (for a nine) or X (for a six). After six throws, you have your primary hexagram.
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Identifying Your Hexagram
Once your six lines are recorded, identify the lower trigram (lines one through three, the bottom half of the hexagram) and the upper trigram (lines four through six, the top half). Look up the combination of lower and upper trigram in the hexagram chart found in any I Ching edition: every edition includes this key, and it is an essential reference until the sixty-four hexagrams become familiar enough to recognise directly. The resulting hexagram number identifies which of the sixty-four situations the oracle is describing in response to your question.
Each hexagram has a name, a Judgment (the core text describing the overall quality of the situation and what it calls for), and an Image (a commentary on the hexagram's natural imagery that describes the attitude and conduct appropriate to the situation). Read the Judgment first, then the Image. These two sections together constitute the primary answer to your question. Allow yourself to sit with them before reading anything further. The language of the I Ching is not always immediately transparent, and the first reading often has less to say than the reading done after a few minutes of reflection.
The translation you use matters. Richard Wilhelm's German translation, rendered into English by Cary Baynes and published by Princeton University Press in 1950, remains the most widely read and the most philosophically rich version available in English, and for most purposes it is the recommended starting point. Wilhelm spent years working with Chinese scholars who had studied the text within the living Confucian tradition, and his translation carries a depth of contextual understanding that more recent academic translations, however more textually precise, do not always match in practical accessibility. The Bollingen edition includes Jung's foreword, which is worth reading as a document in the history of the I Ching's encounter with Western thought, if not as a definitive account of the oracle's mechanism.
Changing Lines and the Second Hexagram
The moving lines, the nines and the sixes, are the most important part of many readings and the aspect of the I Ching system that most beginners misunderstand or overlook. A moving line is a line in transition: a nine is a yang line so fully yang that it is about to flip into yin, and a six is a yin line so fully yin that it is about to flip into yang. The traditional terms for these are old yang and old yin, as opposed to the stable young yang and young yin of the seven and eight. The moving lines are where the energy of the situation is in motion, and the line texts attached to each position in each hexagram describe what is happening at that specific point in the situation's development.
When you have moving lines, read the line texts for each moving line in your primary hexagram. If you have only one moving line, that line text is likely the most specific and pointed part of the oracle's response. If you have two or three moving lines, read all of them and consider them in relationship. If you have four, five, or six moving lines, the reading is one of comprehensive transformation, and the direction of change rather than any single line text is the primary message.
After reading the primary hexagram and the moving line texts, construct the second hexagram by flipping every moving line to its opposite: every nine becomes a yin line, every six becomes a yang line. The stable lines (sevens and eights) remain unchanged. The resulting hexagram is the transformed hexagram, and it describes where the situation is heading, the condition that will emerge from the current state of affairs if the forces in motion continue their natural development. Read its Judgment and Image as the indication of the direction the oracle is pointing toward, the destination to which the current moment, understood correctly and navigated well, is tending.
If you cast a hexagram with no moving lines at all, you have received a statement about a stable situation. Read the primary hexagram's Judgment and Image as your complete answer. The situation is not in flux; the oracle is describing a quality of presence rather than a direction of change.
How to Read the Response
The sequence of reading is always the same. Primary hexagram Judgment first. Then the Image. Then the moving line texts, if any, in order from the lowest to the highest position. Then the transformed hexagram's Judgment and Image. Do not skip directly to the second hexagram, and do not read all six line texts of the primary hexagram indiscriminately: only the moving lines speak to your specific situation in this specific casting.
The I Ching speaks in images, not instructions. It describes the quality and direction of a situation through natural metaphors, the behaviour of water, the movement of thunder, the steadiness of a mountain, the penetration of wind, and asks you to apply that metaphor to your own circumstances. This analogical mode of communication is the most consistently misunderstood aspect of the oracle for new users, who often look for direct advice and instead receive a poem about geese flying toward the shore. The practice is to sit with the image and ask what it describes about your situation: where is the water flowing in this circumstance, where is the mountain asking you to be still, what is the thunder about to set in motion.
Keep a record of every consultation. Write down the date, the question, the hexagram or hexagrams received, the moving lines if any, and your interpretation at the time of reading. Return to the record weeks or months later and note what actually happened. This practice, maintained consistently, teaches you more about the I Ching than any secondary literature, because it shows you directly how the oracle's descriptions relate to the actual shape of events in your own life. Over time the hexagrams become familiar presences, each with its own quality and characteristic atmosphere, and the oracle becomes genuinely conversational rather than intellectually remote.
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What the I Ching Is Not
The I Ching is not a fortune-telling device that tells you whether a specific outcome will occur. It is not a decision-maker that removes the burden of judgment from the person consulting it. It is not a system that works best when consulted repeatedly on the same question in the hope that a more palatable answer will eventually appear: re-casting on the same question the same day is a practice that most experienced I Ching users regard as counterproductive, because it reflects a desire to override what the oracle has said rather than a genuine openness to hearing it. The I Ching asks for honesty in the same way that any serious divinatory tool asks for honesty: it gives back what is brought to it, and if what is brought is wishful thinking rather than genuine inquiry, the responses will reflect that accordingly.
It is also not a text that benefits from being rushed. The I Ching is one of the most carefully layered philosophical documents in the history of human thought, and the secondary literature on it, from the classical Chinese commentators through Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucian synthesis in the Song dynasty to modern translators and interpreters including Stephen Karcher, Sam Reifler, and Richard Rutt, is vast and consistently rewarding. An afternoon spent reading about the history and philosophy of the text will return more to a new practitioner than an afternoon spent casting hexagrams without understanding what they describe. The two activities, reading and consulting, work best together.
Why This Oracle Has Lasted Three Thousand Years
The I Ching survived the Qin dynasty's great burning of books because the first emperor's ministers classified it as a practical manual rather than a philosophical text. It survived Christianisation as a Chinese cultural practice too deeply rooted to be displaced. It survived the Cultural Revolution in the memories of practitioners who could not consult it openly. It has been studied by Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, Neo-Confucians, Jesuits, German philosophers, Swiss psychoanalysts, American novelists, and experimental composers. Whatever it is, it is the kind of thing that serious minds of many different traditions have found worth the considerable effort of learning.
What it offers, when approached with a genuine question and honest attention, is something that is genuinely rare in the available landscape of divinatory practice: a perspective that is not yours. Not a prediction and not an instruction, but a description of the forces at work in a situation from a vantage point that does not share your emotional investment in any particular outcome. The I Ching does not care what you want to happen. It describes what appears to be happening, names the quality of the moment, and lets you decide what to do with that information. After three thousand years of unbroken use, that remains a remarkable and useful thing to have available.
Strange & Twisted covers the history and practice of divination across traditions, from the I Ching and cartomancy to rune casting and tarot. Explore our full How To Guides archive for more historically grounded, practically deep guides to the oracular arts.
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