I Ching Cast

The Yijing is cast by generating six lines from the bottom up. Each line comes out as one of four values: a static yang line, a static yin line, or one of the two changing lines, which count as their own type and then turn into their opposite, producing a second hexagram.

There are two methods. Both are traditional. They do not give the same odds.

The three-coin method is symmetrical — a changing yang line and a changing yin line are equally likely, at one chance in eight each. The yarrow-stalk procedure is not. Its counting produces a changing yang line three times as often as a changing yin line, and produces a static yin line more often than anything else.

That is a real, arithmetical, checkable difference, and it means the two methods are not two ways of doing one thing. The commentarial tradition was built up over centuries around a text consulted by yarrow stalks. Coins are faster, are documented from at least the Tang dynasty, and are what almost everyone uses now.

Whether the difference matters is argued about, and the argument is worth knowing:

• Some practitioners hold the yarrow asymmetry is meaningful — that the oracle is supposed to show strength giving way more readily than yielding does, and that the coin method flattens something the text depends on.
• Others hold it is an artefact of a counting procedure designed for stalks rather than a doctrine, and that nothing in the book itself requires the imbalance.
• A third position, associated with the sixteen-token method some modern practitioners use, is that you can keep the yarrow probabilities without the twenty minutes of counting.

Cast either way below and the odds table is shown underneath, with the method you used marked.

What this does not do

It does not answer a question. It generates a hexagram by a documented procedure, identifies it, shows what changes into what, and tells you where the numbers came from.

It also does not give you the line texts, and the reason is worth stating. The Yijing is a Bronze Age text whose meaning is genuinely uncertain in many places, and the translations differ so much that they are effectively different books:

• James Legge (1882) approached it as a Victorian sinologist working through the Confucian commentaries, and produced something deliberately literal and rather forbidding.
• Richard Wilhelm (1924, into English by Cary Baynes in 1950) worked with the scholar Lao Naixuan and rendered it as living wisdom literature. This is the version most Western readers mean by "the I Ching", and it is the one Jung wrote a foreword for. It remains in copyright.
• Modern historical-critical translators — Richard Rutt, Edward Shaughnessy, Richard Kunst — strip the Confucian layer off and read the core text as what the archaeology suggests it is: a Bronze Age divination manual full of concrete omens, sacrifices, captives and livestock. The result reads far less like philosophy and far more like a record of what the diviners actually wrote down.

Handing you one translation and calling it "the meaning" would be the site asserting something it cannot support. What is given instead, for each hexagram, is its number, its Chinese name, the plain sense of that word, its trigram composition, and what the received tradition takes it to be about. The history and the evidence are in the Library.