The I Ching, or Yi King, the Book of Changes, is consulted by casting a figure of six lines, a hexagram, and reading what the book says about it. This tool casts one with three coins, or reads the throws of your own coins, finds the hexagram among the 64, and shows the text in the public-domain translation by James Legge, published in The Sacred Books of the East, volume 16 (Oxford, 1882).
How it works
Three coins are tossed six times. Each coin counts 3 for heads and 2 for tails, so each throw totals 6, 7, 8 or 9, and the lines are built from the bottom up:
- 7 gives an undivided (solid) line and 8 a divided (broken) line.
- 9 is an undivided line that is moving, and 6 a divided line that is moving.
With three coins, 6 and 9 each come up one time in eight, and 7 and 8 three times in eight. Moving lines change into their opposite, which gives a second hexagram. The figure is looked up among the 64 in the order of the received text, the order Legge follows.
The text shown is Legge’s translation of the Text proper, not his notes or the Appendixes: for each hexagram, King Wan’s paragraph on the whole figure, and the duke of Kau’s paragraph on each of the six lines. Hexagrams 1 and 2 have a seventh paragraph, which speaks of all six lines being nines (or sixes); the tool shows it when all six lines move. Words in round brackets are ones Legge supplied himself: in his preface he explains that he added in parentheses what the writer’s mind supplied, to make the terse Chinese readable. We have kept his spellings of the Chinese names, such as Khien for the first hexagram.
Reading the result
The result draws the figure, names it and its two three-line figures (the trigrams below and above, with the images Legge uses: heaven, earth, thunder, water, mountain, wind, fire and marsh), and gives the paragraph on the whole hexagram. If any lines moved, their paragraphs follow, and then the paragraph of the second hexagram they lead to. All six line texts of your hexagram are there to open if you want to read them.
The language is old and full of images: the superior man, a great stream to cross, firm correctness. Read it slowly, as a set of images for your situation, and notice which phrase stays with you.
Where traditions differ
The older way to cast uses 50 yarrow stalks, as described in the Great Appendix of the book. It gives the same four totals with different odds, 6: 1 in 16, 7: 5 in 16, 8: 7 in 16 and 9: 3 in 16 (as Wikipedia, I Ching divination, sets them out), so with stalks a moving divided line is rarer and a moving undivided line commoner than with coins. Coin users differ on which face counts 3. Readers also weigh several moving lines in different ways; the tool shows them all and leaves the weighing to you.
How we checked the text
For hexagrams 1 to 32 the text is the proofread Wikisource transcription of the 1882 printing, compared word by word with three scans of the same printing. For 33 to 64 we took the readings of the three scans, voted word by word, and proofread every paragraph against the page images, correcting 62 places, most of them the romanised names; three slips in the Wikisource text of hexagrams 1 to 32 were corrected the same way. The figure printed above each of 37 hexagrams, read from the page images, matches our table, and so does an independent table of all 64.
What it does not do
It does not interpret the reading for you or predict events. The I Ching has long been read for wisdom as much as for divination; treat a cast as a prompt for reflection. Your question is only shown back to you and stays in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
↳ How do I cast the I Ching with three coins?
Toss three coins together six times. Count heads as 3 and tails as 2 and add them: 7 is an undivided line, 8 a divided line, 9 a moving undivided line and 6 a moving divided line. Write the lines from the bottom up. You can enter your own throws in the tool, or let it toss for you.
↳ What are moving lines?
Lines that total 6 or 9. They are read on their own, and they turn into their opposite to make a second hexagram, which readers study as well, as the situation the moving lines lead to.
↳ Whose translation is this?
James Legge's, published in The Sacred Books of the East, volume 16, at Oxford in 1882. It is in the public domain. The tool gives the Text itself without Legge's notes.
↳ Why are the names spelled Khien, Khwăn and so on?
Those are Legge's spellings of the Chinese, from before pinyin. In pinyin the first two hexagrams are Qian and Kun. We kept Legge's forms so the text reads as he printed it.
↳ Are coins as good as yarrow stalks?
Both give the same four kinds of line, but with different odds for the moving lines. The yarrow method is the older one, described in the book itself; the coin method, which is quicker, came into use more than a thousand years later, as Wikipedia, I Ching divination, puts it.
↳ Can the I Ching predict the future?
No. It is one of the classics of Chinese thought, and a cast is best read as a way to look at a question afresh, not as a forecast.