You don’t need to know
all the answers to begin.

The I Ching, also called Yijing or the Book of Changes, is a Chinese classic with a long history of divination and philosophical interpretation. At its heart are 64 six-line figures called hexagrams. Here, we use them as invitations to reflection, without treating a cast as evidence about the future.

I Ching and Yijing are different ways of writing the Chinese name 易經 in Roman letters. Zhouyi, “Changes of Zhou,” refers to the early text and is also used in titles of later editions and commentaries. We keep I Ching as the familiar entrance and explain these names as you explore.

In the diagrams, yin is a broken line and yang is an unbroken line. They describe contrasting, interrelated qualities within a traditional symbolic system. They are not a ranking of good and bad, or a fixed classification of people.

Bagua means the eight trigrams. Each has three lines and a traditional natural image: Heaven, Earth, Thunder, Wind, Water, Fire, Mountain, or Lake. Every hexagram is made of a lower and an upper trigram.

In both our coin and digital yarrow methods, values of 6 and 9 create changing lines. A changing yin line becomes yang; a changing yang line becomes yin. The transformed pattern is called the relating hexagram. We display all changing lines without selecting a single “ruling” line.

Try a question that invites your participation: “What should I pay attention to as I approach this change?” or “How could I respond more thoughtfully?” This is an editorial suggestion for reflective practice—not a rule that gives a cast predictive power.