Background

The I-Ching (Yijing, or Book of Changes), compiled in the late 9th century BC, is one of the oldest and most influential books in Chinese history. Yi means change: it is a system for describing the nature of the world and how it moves in harmony with its own patterns. Beyond its popular life as a divination manual, it shaped Confucianism and Taoism and has drawn thinkers from philosophy and religion to mathematics, physics, and astronomy.

The hexagrams

Yin and Yang form the two modes; combined they give the four phases, and combined again the eight trigrams invented by Fu Xi. Each of the 64 hexagrams is a stack of an upper and a lower trigram — six solid or broken lines. Every hexagram has a name, a one-line Decision (or Judgement), and Yao Texts that comment on each of its six lines. Here the lines are redrawn as squares and hues so the sequence, the inverse pairs, and the opposite pairs become visible at a glance.

The four readings

• Yao Text — the line commentaries, with the transitions between auspicious, neutral and ominous stages traced across the wheel.
• Commentary Subjects — the themes each hexagram touches, from nature and artifact to politics, family, mindset and the senses.
• Divinatory Keywords — the most frequent keywords of the Decisions, sorted into positive, neutral and negative meaning.
• Geometrical Patterns — line positions, the eight trigrams, and the inverse and opposite pairings of the sixty-four.