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Yijing Research

Tradition and Continuing Practice

After this journey through manuscripts, divination records and later systems, we are back where we began: with somebody who would like to consult the Yijing. What should they do? The pleasing answer is that there are several good starting points, and each opens a somewhat different side of the tradition.

Stalks and coins

The stalk method is associated with the classical account in the Xici zhuan 繫辭傳, one of the Ten Wings. In its familiar later form, a set of yarrow stalks is divided and counted repeatedly to produce each line. The procedure is quiet and physical. It takes a little time, which some readers enjoy because it gives the consultation its own rhythm.

The three-coin method is quicker. Toss three coins for each of six lines, recording the results from the bottom upwards. Depending on how the faces are valued, each throw gives one of the four traditional line values 6, 7, 8 or 9. Six and nine usually designate moving lines; seven and eight, non-moving lines. Both methods ultimately produce a six-line figure that can be located in the book.

The coin and later yarrow-stalk procedures give different frequencies to the four line values. This is an interesting detail to explore once you are comfortable with the method. Choose a method you enjoy, learn it well and see what kind of result it produces. If you become curious about the historical details, the numerical gua and the Shifa will show you why the counting methods have such an interesting history.

Reading the figures

Some users turn straight to the text. I prefer to spend time with the hexagram itself. What are the two trigrams? How do their images fit together? What is happening in the moving lines? What relationships are created within the figure? You can often learn a great deal before opening a translation.

A useful first habit is to describe the picture in ordinary language. If the upper trigram is Water and the lower one Thunder, what kind of movement or situation might that suggest? Do not worry about finding one perfect sentence. Look at the images as though you were looking at the scene of a story. The situation in front of you will help determine which details matter.

A second habit is to compare the figure with its written statement. The words may confirm the impression, redirect your attention or add an image you had not thought of. If a moving line is involved, examine that line in the context of its position and trigrams before concentrating only on the resulting hexagram. The old and new figures can be read in relation to each other without forcing every consultation into one universal rule.

What can a later method add?

The Eight Palaces and Wenwang Gua approach a result through relationships among the lines, the Five Phases, relevant roles and time. These techniques are particularly rewarding for questions in which you need to distinguish several people, forces or stages. A text-based reading of the Zhouyi may instead place a memorable image at the centre of the consultation. A person who studies both approaches gains more than a larger toolbox: they see how differently generations of Chinese diviners have thought about the same six-line figures.

There are also methods built around trigram circles, nuclear trigrams 互卦, enveloping trigrams 包體, and the 三才 sancai, Heaven, Human and Earth. I cover several of these in my course The Power of the Hexagrams. Each can become useful when you have a real question and have learned what the method is designed to illuminate. The most important skill is not knowing every association; it is recognizing which part of the figure deserves your attention.

Ten laws that are not really laws

In an old Serendipity post I once published The Ten Laws of Proper Yijing Practice. The title was deliberately provocative. One of the “laws” says that receiving the same hexagram three times means receiving three different answers. That sounds strange until you remember that the same image can illuminate quite different situations.

I used the example of hexagram 3, 屯, whose imagery is often connected with the difficulties of a beginning. A friend had consulted the Yi about teaching a beginners’ course and obtained hexagram 3. He might have taken it to mean that the course would get off to a bad start. But the people he was going to teach were precisely those who were just beginning and needed help. Suddenly hexagram 3 looked rather appropriate. The figure had not changed; the situation had given its imagery a particular meaning.

That is the sort of lively exchange I hope readers will have with the Yijing. Learn what the texts and figures say, then see what happens when they meet a real question.

Return to an actual case

One of the old Wenwang Gua cases I discuss begins with a straightforward question but develops into an exploration of the intention behind it. The diviner finds that the declared subject and the concern actually occupying the person’s mind may be different. The lesson is not that the oracle has caught somebody behaving badly. It is that the reading makes better sense when the situation itself is honestly understood.

Another case concerns a sick child. The traditional judgment follows the line relevant to the child and its development through the figure. Here the result does not emerge from the modern English name of a hexagram. It comes from the structure, the role of a line and the recorded circumstances. Read the two cases side by side and you begin to appreciate just how varied the practice of Yi divination became.

For readers who want to begin, I suggest keeping a notebook: the date, the situation, the method used, the obtained figure and your initial impressions. Return to the notes later. Sometimes what seemed important immediately turns out to have been a small detail, and something unnoticed becomes clearer with time. That is how personal experience and the discipline of recording observations can support one another.

A tradition that keeps opening up

Studying the Yijing is not a march toward a final and perfect interpretation. There is the old book, with its extraordinary scenes and compact Chinese sentences. There are the excavated manuscripts that bring its history closer. There are the classical thinkers who found philosophy in its images, and the diviners who developed intricate methods of interpreting its figures. And there is the person consulting it now, with a situation that no ancient scribe could have imagined.

I began studying the Yi as a teenager, and it has never become a closed subject for me. A new inscription, an unfamiliar reading of a character or an old consultation can send me back to a passage I thought I knew. The fun is in finding out what that new detail allows us to see.

If this guide has made you curious about one hexagram, one ancient manuscript or one way of working with the lines, it has done its job. There is plenty more to explore. My research archive, older Serendipity articles and videos extend many of the subjects introduced here; the references at the end of each chapter lead back to the Chinese sources and scholarly work behind them. The Yijing has many doors. Choose one, and enter.

Sources and further reading