Casting methods

Yarrow stalk divination

Fifty dried stalks, one set aside, the rest divided by hand and counted off in fours. Three rounds build one line, eighteen build a hexagram, and the whole procedure takes the better part of an hour. It is the oldest attested way of consulting the Changes and the only one whose odds the classic itself describes.

50
stalks
18
changes
3/16
chance of a moving yang

The procedure

One line takes three operations and a hexagram takes eighteen. Each stage is mechanical, and the reason for its particular arithmetic is the part people most often want explained.

🌾

The fifty stalks

China Zhou onward

The Great Treatise gives the number of the Great Expansion as fifty, of which forty-nine are used. Why one is withdrawn has been argued for two thousand years; the practical effect is to leave an odd number that cannot divide evenly.

1️⃣

Withdrawing the observer

China Zhou onward

One stalk is taken from the fifty and laid aside for the whole reading. It is not counted again. Commentators read it variously as the Supreme Polarity, the unmoved centre, or simply the diviner, standing outside the process being watched.

✋

The random division

China Zhou onward

The forty-nine are divided into two heaps at a stroke, without counting. This is the only genuinely random act in the operation; everything after it is arithmetic. The two heaps are conventionally read as heaven and earth.

🖐️

Hanging one between the fingers

China Zhou onward

A single stalk is taken from the right heap and held between the little and ring fingers of the left hand. Traditionally it stands for humanity, completing the triad with heaven and earth.

4️⃣

Counting off by fours

China Zhou onward

Each heap is counted away four at a time, said to represent the four seasons, until four or fewer remain. Those remainders, plus the hanging stalk, are set aside as the yield of this operation.

🔁

Three operations to a line

China Zhou onward

The remainders are removed and the whole division is repeated twice more with the reduced bundle. After three operations the stalks left in hand number 36, 32, 28 or 24, which divided by four give 9, 8, 7 or 6.

🔢

Reading 6, 7, 8 and 9

China Zhou onward

Nine is old yang and six is old yin, both moving; seven is young yang and eight young yin, both stable. These four numbers are why every line text in the classic is labelled a nine or a six.

⏳

Eighteen changes

China Zhou onward

Six lines at three operations each gives eighteen, the phrase the Great Treatise uses. Built from the bottom up, the hexagram takes most practitioners between thirty and sixty minutes.

⚖️

The lopsided odds

China Zhou onward

The method yields old yang three times in sixteen and old yin only once in sixteen. Moving yang is three times as likely as moving yin, an asymmetry the coin method erases and the single most consequential difference between them.

🪶

The sixteen-stalk shortcut

China Song onward

A faster procedure using sixteen marked tokens that reproduces the yarrow probabilities exactly. It is the honest compromise for anyone who wants the ancient odds without the ancient hour.

🕯️

The ritual frame

China Song onward

Zhu Xi set down a full protocol: the orientation of the table, the incense, the washing, the announcement of the question. The formality is not decoration; the slowness of the method is understood to be part of how it works.

➡️

Deriving the second hexagram

China Zhou onward

Any moving lines are flipped to their opposites to give a second figure, read as where the situation is heading. With no moving lines there is no second hexagram and only the Judgment and Image are read.

Sources, materials and variants

The texts that describe the method, the plant itself, and the shortcuts and reconstructions that have grown up around it.

The Great Treatise

c. 3rd century BCE China

The Xici, one of the Ten Wings, contains the only ancient description of the procedure, in a passage so compressed that reconstructing it has occupied commentators ever since. It gives the fifty stalks, the four seasons and the eighteen changes.

Achillea millefolium

the plant Eurasia

Common yarrow, whose straight woody stems dry hard and light. Chinese tradition prized stalks from the grave-mound of Confucius; in practice any straight stems of even length will serve, and bamboo is widely used.

Zhu Xi's protocol

12th century Fujian

The Yixue qimeng sets out the ceremony in full: the room, the table, the incense, the invocation and the counting. It is the source most later manuals follow, and it fixed the method's modern form.

The Song reconstructions

11th to 12th century Song China

Song scholars had to work out the procedure from the Great Treatise's few lines, and disagreed about details such as whether remainders are taken from both heaps or one. Several defensible variants descend from that argument.

Wilhelm's description

1924 Germany

Richard Wilhelm's edition carried the yarrow procedure to Western readers, and most English-language accounts descend from his. It is faithful to the Zhu Xi tradition rather than to anything demonstrably Zhou.

The three-coin method

Tang onward China

The fast rival, which produces a line in seconds and flattens the four outcomes toward symmetry. Whether that difference matters is the standing argument between the two methods.

Marble and bead methods

20th century the West

Sixteen beads or marbles in the right proportions, drawn from a bag, give the yarrow odds in one action per line. A modern solution to an old complaint about time.

The manuscript evidence

excavated 1973 Hunan

The Mawangdui silk texts confirm that the Changes circulated in variant forms around 200 BCE but say nothing about casting technique. No Zhou-period description of the procedure has ever been found.

The historical caveat

modern scholarship the academy

Scholars are clear that the received yarrow method is a Song reconstruction of a passage in a Han-era appendix. What Zhou diviners actually did with stalks is unknown, and probably was not this.

Numerical hexagrams

Shang and Zhou artefacts China

Bronzes and oracle bones carry clusters of numerals now read as early hexagram notation, using a wider range of digits than six to nine. They are the closest physical evidence of pre-classical divinatory counting.

Getting stalks today

contemporary worldwide

Prepared sets are sold by specialist suppliers, and practitioners also cut and dry their own. Length is conventionally uniform and the stalks are stored wrapped, since brittleness is the main practical problem.

The time objection

perennial everywhere

Three-quarters of an hour per question is the method's real barrier, and every shortcut since the Tang has been an answer to it. Defenders argue the interval is doing part of the work.

What actually happens

You begin with fifty dried stalks. One is removed and set aside for the whole consultation and plays no further part. The remaining forty-nine are divided into two heaps in a single unconsidered motion, and that division is the only random event in the entire procedure; everything after it is counting.

One stalk is taken from the right-hand heap and held between the little and ring fingers of the left hand. Then each heap is counted away four at a time until four or fewer remain, and those remainders, together with the hanging stalk, are put aside. What is left in hand is divided again, and again, three operations in all.

After the third, the stalks remaining number 36, 32, 28 or 24. Divide by four and you have 9, 8, 7 or 6. Nine is a moving yang line, six a moving yin, seven and eight the stable forms. Draw the line and start over. Six lines, eighteen operations, and most of an hour.

Why the numbers are what they are

The classic gives symbolic accounts of each element. Fifty is the number of the Great Expansion. The division into two heaps is heaven and earth, the hanging stalk is humanity between them, and counting by fours is the four seasons. The Great Treatise says so, and it is where the whole reconstruction begins.

More practically, withdrawing one stalk from fifty leaves an odd number, so the two heaps can never be equal, and the arithmetic of the remainders is what produces exactly four possible outcomes. The procedure is engineered, whatever cosmology is laid over it.

The odds, and why they matter

This is the substantive point about yarrow, and it is often skipped. The four outcomes are not equally likely, and they are not even close.

Old yang comes up three times in sixteen. Young yang, five. Young yin, seven. Old yin, once in sixteen. A moving yang line is three times as likely as a moving yin line, and stable yin is the most common single result by a wide margin.

The three-coin method flattens this. There the odds run one in eight for each moving line and three in eight for each stable one, symmetrical between yin and yang. Whether that difference is important is the standing argument between the two methods. What is not in dispute is that they are different oracles in a measurable sense: cast the same question a thousand times each way and the distribution of answers will not match.

Anyone who wants the old odds without the old hour can use sixteen marked tokens drawn from a bag in the correct proportions, which reproduces the yarrow distribution exactly in one action per line.

How old is it, really

Here the honest answer is less romantic than the practice deserves. The only ancient description is a short, compressed passage in the Great Treatise, itself a Han-era appendix rather than part of the Zhou original. It is terse enough that Song scholars had to reconstruct the method from it, and they disagreed on details that are still variant today.

The procedure most people follow is Zhu Xi's twelfth-century codification, complete with his protocol for the room, the incense and the invocation. It is a genuine and continuous tradition roughly nine hundred years old, resting on a Han description of something older.

What Zhou diviners actually did with yarrow stalks is not known. Numerical clusters on Shang and Zhou bronzes suggest counting procedures using a wider range of numbers than six through nine, and the Mawangdui manuscripts, which confirm the text was still fluid around 200 BCE, say nothing about technique. Calling yarrow the ancient method is fair; calling it the original one is not.

Whether to use it

The case for is the slowness. Forty-five minutes of counting between asking a question and receiving an answer is a long time to sit with a question, and practitioners consistently report that this changes the quality of the consultation. The ritual frame exists to make that interval deliberate rather than tedious.

The case against is also the slowness, plus the fragility of the stalks and the ease of losing count. Many practitioners keep the stalks for questions that warrant them and use coins for everything else, which is roughly how Chinese practice has worked since the Tang.

Frequently asked questions

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