I realized that the major I-Ching English translations today different dramatically, and don't even use the same naming for the hexagrams. So wanted to do a quick survey - which is the favorite English I-Ching translation and why?

Hello, I asked the oracle about my situation with my ex girlfriend that I broke up 3 months ago. We recently started talking again, I asked should I continue the interaction with her and received hex 37 changing line 5.

But then I found myself whenever I talk with her I get this uneasy anxiety feeling and asked the oracle Why is this anxiety occurring whenever Im interacting with her and received Hex 8 changing line 3.

First hexagram seems to say positively about the interaction but second one says I’m associating with the wrong person?

Hello all
I am an I ching user since 45 years. I have looked at may different orderings of the hexagrams, and always expected to find the continuing story, but any try at ordering them by semantics failed when using rows and columns. There was no order.

Today I come from a really different angle, the genetic code. With its four letters and 64 words. I discovered that only one order works to organize and serialize the RNA codons with the smallest, least difference inbetween adjacent codons. The same mathematical rules applied to the i ching (using bigrams instead of trigrams) shows a fascinating order of the hexagram sequences. They tell three stories. Earth - Man - Heaven.

The casting is like any other one, but under the hood we have mathematical order.

Casting a hexagram and clicking it shows a flip and a story button.

The Flip is showing the complement hexagram, the Story explains.

On the bottom is a help section where i show the mathematics in more detail.

I have written the mathematical proof that the 64 codon RNA code and by extension the 64 hexagram I Ching have to use ONE specific order to reveal a semantic meaningful progression without conflicts.

After ordering the I ching like the RNA, the hexagrams became ordered sequences. The flip all lines is really the opposite situation for all 64.

The error with the known i ching orders was not the identification of the trigram split, but the mapping of rows and columns with trigram labels.

Earth Man Heaven is a really really old concept, way before the grid orders, but was the hint for the correct order. Three bigrams is how they have to be read to make sense from one hexagram to the next.

The yin/yang revealed is 32 + 32, not 1-64.

The Bigram I Ching is an offline html page that anyone can use at home even without internet. I am hosting it so free download is possible. I will never charge for it.

It's a giveaway before I leave the planet :-)

I hope this is a useful addition to all other orderings we know about the I ching hexagrams.

thanks for the patience to read this dense introduction.

I welcome discussion and additions.

I've been studying the I Ching and found that most apps are either oracle tools (cast a reading) or text references - but nothing that actually teaches the system structurally from scratch.

So I built one. It's a web app - no download needed - that walks you through:

• Yin & Yang
• The 8 Trigrams
• Five Elements
• All 64 Hexagrams
• Quizzes after each module
• Final exam

It's fully bilingual (English + Traditional & Simplified Chinese) because a lot of the concepts honestly land better in Chinese.

Module 1 is free to try. If you want to continue, the full unlock is A$4.99 - one time, no subscription.

Try it here: https://butterbuzzstudio.github.io/iching/

Happy to answer any questions about the I Ching or the app.

I want to make a clothing brand and wanted a logo/motif, so I asked for an hexagram with 5 unbroken lines and got no 13 unchanging.

Does it match up with this brand description:

'a premium lifestyle brand representing an eternal, consequence-free urban utopia where the raw energy of underground subcultures meets a pristine, nocturnal aesthetic of absolute personal freedom.'

Hello everyone, I asked the I Ching: "How should I integrate my bisexuality into my life at this moment?"

I received Hexagram 25 (Innocence) with changing lines in the 2nd and 3rd positions, leading to Hexagram 1 (The Creative).

I interpret the 25 as a call to be authentic and spontaneous, and the 1 as a powerful new beginning. However, I’m a bit unsure about the 3rd line’s warning of "unmerited loss."

I would love to hear your insights on how these lines apply to a journey of self-acceptance and identity. Thank you!

Richard John Lynn's translation of Wang Bi's \"Classic Of Changes\", softbound.

​ I like Wang Bi's work (but not the Lynn translation so much, as the guy adds so much unnecessary extra words in his Chinese translation - a sign of not really grasping the essence of a text and needing to supplement with roundabout-vernacular).

When you read the original work of Wang Bi in classical Chinese, he is straight and to the point.

Bi was a prolific philosopher; he invented his own framework for how he saw the Yi and also due to his close proximity with the original Daoism of the Zhou era (post Han-Dynasty Daoism already became something different, something new age, far from the original Daoism), his views on such with the Yi are very interesting. For me it's easier to seperate his views on Daoism with the Zhou era's Changes, though he often draws parallels and concepts from the Daoism of the time; also his views on governence, morality etc is very "old skool", not fettered by Post Han dynasty Confucianist/Neo Confucianist flim flam.

Bi created a framework of viewing and using the Yi firstly away from all the clever devices (especially the whole "changing line polarity" idea) and convoluted concepts (numerology, complex mathematical calculations, mysticism); THE GREATNESS OF WANG BI was that he understood the "finger pointing to the moon" (from the Shurangama Sutra, made famous by Bruce Lee)...

The way the ancient Diviners composed the bronze age text of the Yi alludes to the "finger pointing to the moon" principle. Words to are there to describe concept/idea/theme of hexagrams images; the imagery inherent within the hexagrams captures the essence of the hexagram; and the essence lies in abstract principles, very (original) Daoist. From being stuck in the left brain mode of language, meanings, etymology, words, Wang Bi moves the reader into the realms of imagery (Diamond Sutra: once you arrive at the other shore you let go of the the raft); from there we are lead into the journey of the abstract ideas inherent within all the Yi. (Another great Author in this regard is Zhu Xi - his minimalist commentary style in the "Original meaning of the Yijing" as well as his rule of keeping his views and opinions to a bare minimum in his commentary).

An example is the argumenet that Qian #1 represents a horse in associative terms...often the Yi practioners of his time took it very literally...that Qian is a horse....but in his General Remarks and the following chapters, he strikes this fallacy down and encourages us to think otherwise.

This is important as Bi captures the intutiive way of viewing the Yi just as the old Diviners of antiquity (unhindered by language, operating on a right-brained level of lateral thinking/observation/application of the Yi); this is what is missing in the Western practice of the Yi (which as a Hong Kong man seems to me a huge case of "Chinese Whispers" gone way out of control; especially when you have Westerners supplementing their own misunderstandings of the Yi with their own interpretations, often gotten from others suffering the same problem).

Wang Bi teaches us how to learn.

What i also like about Bi's thought-framework is his views on Yin & Yang applied to hexagram structures. The general rule is that in a hexagram, the inherent interplay an relationship of the trigrams acting upon each other; the relationship of the lines; the ideas of yin yang attraction; the ideas of line phrasing; the appointment of the appropriate masters/ruler/leader of the hexagrams either by means of the hexagram essence (take #44 for example, the structure of the hexagram and it's line imagary tells you what the essence of the hexagram, where the master of the hexagram is - first 6 - before even reading any of the judgements or line texts...let alone the Wings...especially the ones created after the 3rd BC...) or by virtue of position (5th position). All of these are prolific ideas to digest.

Wang Bi's coherent thought-structure is expressed throughout the his work; he never deviants from his "world-building" (taking inspiration from fiction writers like JRR Tolkien). His Yi world-building is amazing...i would have been very nice to have a conversation with the man.

It belies his single focused mind and how he has really took the Daoist views of THE ONE in relationship to the TEN THOUSAND THANGS into his journey with the Yi.

Lynn's book is very good to hold; the book can be held and read with a single normal sized hand; it has a very good weight to it; the pages are jam packed with goodness and the book is compact! I also like the way Lynn manages the notes of each hexagram chapter....unlike say Joseph Adder's Zhu Xi book "THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF THE YIJING" oh my i sometimes want to rip this book apart....because the notes are at the back of the book whilst the hexagram chapters are at the front....so basically you are constantly flipping back and forth to get to the notes and further readings...

With Lynn's book, the formatting, the typography, the paper used, the ink, the binding, even in soft cover is very well done.

I enjoy taking my highlighters and using them on the pages of this book. I personally love highlighting stuffs and Lynn's book is amazing to highlight on.

Everyone needs to get this book; this one book alone, if studied exclusively for at least half a year will elevate your Yi-game to a next level.

Put down the Wilhelm, Legge, Blofield, Alfred Huang, Ritsema/Karcher, Hatcher and the elk...these are all interpretations that only pollute your understanding on whats more important: Understanding the system and principles of the Yi, rather than other people's thoughts.

I personally don't ascribe to much of Wang Bi's own interpretation of the Yi as it's still heavily influenced by early Confucianism and also pre-Zhou/Zhou/Post-Zhou dynasty Daoism. What's valuable to me is how Bi opened by eyes to the mechanics, the essence, the principles of the Yi and the hexagrams; the gift of his Yi-framework is a great boon in the practice and study of the Yi.

After years of consulting the Yi I started keeping a tally of which hexagrams came up most often. The intuition was simple: if the Yi is responsive to whatever question you bring, you’d expect a fairly even distribution across the 64 hexagrams over many readings at about 1.5% per hexagram.

What I found is that a small number come up at five or ten times that rate during a particular phase of life, and they tend to be the same ones across very different questions.

To me that’s not noise. It’s the Yi naming the underlying terrain that all my surface questions are sitting on.

The corollary I didn’t expect is what’s interesting: the hexagrams that don’t appear at all are often as informative as the ones that do. Looking back through months of my own journal, the long absences haven’t tracked with what’s irrelevant to my life, they’ve tracked with what I’ve been avoiding asking about.

Hexagrams I’d never cast would suddenly arrive once I named the situation honestly to myself or to someone close.

I’m not making a metaphysical claim about this. The simpler reading is that the hexagrams I don’t cast tend to mirror the questions I haven’t yet learned to ask and once I ask them, the relevant hexagrams arrive. Which is interesting whether you read the Yi as oracle, as Jungian mirror, or as a set of archetypes.

For a long time I tracked all this on paper. When that got out of hand I built a small tool to do it. Please ask me for it if interested, the moderators don’t take kindly to links in posts.

The “Recurring Energy” panel ranks all 64 hexagrams by your personal frequency including the absences sorted at the bottom. Primary, resulting and changing lines as separate columns, with time filters if you want to see the pattern over a particular period. Does anyone have any further ideas on ways to zero in on the metadata? Note all journal entries are locally saved, so there are no privacy issues here.

If anyone tries it I’d genuinely be curious what patterns you’d find and especially whether anyone else has noticed long-term absences tracking with avoidance more than irrelevance.

Hello! I might need some help with a reading. I asked the I Ching a question that has a bit of frustration in it, I have to be honest. What I asked was: “Why doesn’t love come to me? When will my joy come?”
I got hexagram 43 with 4 mutant lines (first, third, fourth and sixth).
I am 28, I’ve never had a relationship (just a couple of situationships, both times my heart was shattered into pieces), but deep down I long for a reciprocal love, the kind of love I have never had in my life. It might sound like the silly rant of a superficial teenager, but it’s an important topic to me. When I catch feels for someone (no matter who he is), these feelings can get quite intense and when it goes to waste, life turns black and white and it affects me more than I want to admit.

I was thinking about a potential new romantic situation and this is what I drew.

After a series of bad experiences, I sort of had given up, but a person has appeared in my life recently that I am hopeful about. Hopeful but still reticent -- I am having a hard time relaxing into this situation, so I am wondering if this might be part of the "difficulties" indicated in 3? I would love to hear any interpretations about this.