The world's schools of the Book of Changes

One book of change

The I Ching, the Classic of Changes, is not a single work but a text laid down in layers. At its core stand sixty-four hexagrams, figures of six stacked lines that are either solid, for Yang, or broken, for Yin. Legend credits the culture hero Fuxi with drawing the first eight trigrams from marks on a tortoise shell. The oldest layer, the Zhouyi, was a plain divination manual of the Western Zhou, consulted by manipulating yarrow stalks to answer a question. Centuries later a set of philosophical appendices known as the Ten Wings, traditionally tied to Confucius, was folded in, and the oracle became a cosmology. Underneath it all runs a single idea: that the interplay of Yin and Yang, the alternating states of Qi, generates every phenomenon, and that the one constant worth studying is change itself.

Two ways of reading: Xiangshu and Yili

By the Han dynasty, scholarship had split into two great lineages. The Xiangshu, or Symbol-Number school, tried to build a rigorous, predictive machine of the cosmos. Scholars such as Meng Xi and Jing Fang tied the hexagrams to the solar calendar, the Five Elements and the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches through systems like Gua Qi, the Eight Palaces and Na Jia, treating human and cosmic events as linked by numerical law. Against this came the Yili, or Meaning-Principle school, founded by Wang Bi in the third century, who argued that the symbols were only vehicles and urged readers to 'grasp the meaning and forget the symbols'. Read through Daoist metaphysics, the text became a guide to ethics and self-cultivation. In the Song dynasty Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi brought the two strands together, and Zhu Xi's reading made the I Ching a fixture of the civil service examinations.

Casting the hexagram

The oldest authenticated way to consult the text is the yarrow stalk method, a deliberately slow and meditative counting of fifty stalks. One is set aside for the absolute, the rest divided and counted off in fours across three operations, until each line resolves to a 6, 7, 8 or 9. The mathematics carry a hidden philosophy: the four kinds of line are not equally likely, and a moving Yang line comes up three times as often as a moving Yin, reflecting an old sense that the active force is volatile while the receptive force is stable. Much later the three-coin toss took over for its speed, but it flattens the odds into a symmetrical result, erasing the ancient bias. Purists have answered with marked coins, colored marbles and special card decks that restore the yarrow probabilities while keeping the speed of a quick throw.

Wen Wang Gua and Plum Blossom

Out of Jing Fang's Han innovations grew Wen Wang Gua, the Six Lines system, which largely sets the classic text aside and reads the hexagram as an elemental matrix. It marks a subject line for the querent and an object line for what they ask about, weighs the Six Relationships of competition, wealth, authority, parents and offspring, and watches for branches that fall into the 'void' of the sixty-step cycle, a sign of delay or hollow promise. A very different method is Plum Blossom Numerology, credited to Shao Yong, which needs no coins or stalks at all. It draws the hexagram from the world at hand, a time, a count of objects, a color, the flight of a bird, then reads the result through the Ti-Yong balance, treating one trigram as the self and the other as the situation, with a mutual hexagram to show the hidden middle of events.

The inner furnace: Daoist alchemy

Because the text reduces the universe to the play of Yin and Yang, it became the natural language of Daoist alchemy. The Cantong Qi, traditionally ascribed to Wei Boyang in the second century, is its founding work, uniting the I Ching, Huang-Lao philosophy and the labor of the furnace. Where early external alchemy smelted real minerals, inner alchemy, Neidan, turned the process inward. The body becomes the crucible, its energies are refined like lead and mercury, and the sixty-four hexagrams serve as dials that time the 'firing process' across a day, a month or a year. The goal is to reverse the sequence of creation and gestate an immortal embryo in the lower abdomen, a discipline serious enough to draw commentaries from figures as major as Zhu Xi.

The trigrams in motion: Baguazhang

The same philosophy took physical form in Baguazhang, the Eight Trigram Palm, an internal martial art created in the nineteenth century by Dong Haichuan. Its premise is the core teaching of the I Ching, that nothing stays fixed and that rigidity invites destruction. The practitioner walks the edge of a circle with sliding, mud-wading steps, constantly changing angle to evade force, and the syllabus is built on eight 'mother palms', one for the energy of each trigram, from the relentless outward force of Qian to the yielding absorption of Kun. Later masters split the art into distinct styles for wrestling, striking and joint locks. The Baguazhang fighter does not study the text so much as embody it, turning hard attacks into soft evasions and evasions back into strikes.

Korea: medicine and prophecy

In the deeply Confucian Joseon dynasty, the I Ching, known as the Juyeok, stood at the center of thought. Toegye Yi Hwang and Yulgok Yi I built long debates about principle and material force on its metaphysics. In the late nineteenth century Lee Je-ma made a further leap, grounding a whole system of medicine in the text's generative sequence from the absolute to Yin and Yang to the four images. His Sasang medicine sorts everyone into four constitutions with different organ strengths, so that a remedy which heals one type can harm another. At the same time Kim Il-bu's Jeongyeok recast the classic as prophecy, arguing that the old hierarchical order was giving way to a harmonious 'Later Heaven', an idea that fed several Korean new religions.

Japan: from Zen to statecraft

Japan first received the text through Zen monks of the Kyoto Gozan temples, who read it in an easy blend of Buddhism and Confucianism. Under the Tokugawa shogunate it was promoted into official state philosophy and pulled away from Buddhism. In the seventeenth century Yamazaki Ansai went further, arguing that the truths of the I Ching were identical to native Shinto and binding the Chinese cosmos to the Japanese gods in his Suika Shinto. In the Meiji era the self-taught diviner Takashima Kaemon, who learned the text in prison, used yarrow stalks to advise ministers and published a vast commentary, turning the classic into a bridge for rapid modernisation. His name still sells popular almanacs across Japan today.

Vietnam: prophecy, flags and temples

In Vietnam the text, the Kinh Dịch, ran through scholarship, politics and religion. In the turbulent sixteenth century the sage Nguyen Binh Khiem retreated from a corrupt court and advised rival warlords with cryptic hexagram poetry, forecasting shifts generations ahead. Its trigrams even reached the national flag: the Empire of Vietnam flew the Li trigram of fire and the south in 1945, and the later Republic flew the three solid lines of Qian, read as heaven and as the union of the country's three regions. Its esoteric peak is Caodaism, founded in 1926, whose Holy See at Tây Ninh is built around the eight trigrams, an octagonal palace marrying the binary origins of the I Ching to a world where the divine fills the whole of Yin and Yang.

The Western encounter

When the text reached Europe it was taken seriously as structure, not dismissed as superstition. The Jesuit Joachim Bouvet, at the Kangxi court, sent the Fuxi arrangement of the hexagrams to Leibniz in 1701. Leibniz, long in search of a use for base-two arithmetic, saw his own binary code in it, read the broken line as zero and the solid line as one, and took the diagram as proof that his logic was ancient and divinely given. In the twentieth century Carl Jung, working with Marie-Louise von Franz, used the oracle to develop synchronicity, an acausal principle in which the diviner's inner state and the outer fall of the coins share a single field of meaning. And in molecular biology some have noted that the sixty-four hexagrams match the sixty-four codons of the genetic code, a symmetry sceptics call coincidence and enthusiasts call vindication.

How to use this library

Browse by school to follow one reading of the text from its origins, whether that is Han symbol-number, Song meaning-principle, Daoist alchemy or the Western encounter, or browse by method to compare how the hexagram is cast and applied, from yarrow stalks and coins to Six Lines, Plum Blossom, medicine and statecraft. Every tradition, its methods and its vocabulary are available in the fifty-two languages of the Tarot Academy ecosystem, so you can study change in the language you think in.