The I Ching: A Beginner's Guide to the 64 Hexagrams by Gavin - HTML preview
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changing yang
solid line, marked ○
Your rst throw is the bottom line. Each following throw stacks on top of the last, so the sixth throw is the top line. Record all six before you look anything up.
Find your hexagram
Read the six lines as a gure and nd it in the reference that follows. The Hexagram Finder on the next page indexes all sixty-four by their line pattern.
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Start with the whole gure
Read the hexagram's name, judgment and image rst, before any individual line. The judgment states the situation and what stance it rewards; the image gives the natural picture the tradition attached to it and, usually, what a person of judgment does about it. This is the frame — the lines are details inside it.
Then read only your moving lines
If your reading produced no 6s and no 9s, the situation is stable: the hexagram as a whole is your answer, and you can stop there. Otherwise, read the line statements only for the positions that moved. The other lines describe the gure in general, not your case.
Position matters. The bottom line is the beginning of a situation, still small and often hidden; the top line is its end, frequently past its useful peak. The fth position is traditionally the seat of the person with authority, and the second its capable counterpart below.
Follow the change
Now ip every moving line into its opposite — changing yang becomes yin, changing yin becomes yang — and read the second hexagram that results. This is the direction the situation is heading, given how it currently stands. A reading is a movement from one gure to the other: rst hexagram, moving lines, second hexagram.
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The oracle is not a forecast to be veried but a lens for a decision you were already going to make. A reading has done its work when it makes one course of action look clearly more honest than another. If nothing shifts, the question was usually the problem, not the answer.
Each entry in the reference that follows includes a short reading for every line, telling you what it means when that line is the one that moves — and which hexagram it turns into.
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All sixty-four gures in King Wen order. Lines are read from the bottom up.