Casting methods

Coin and modern casting

Three coins, six throws, about a minute. The coin method replaced yarrow for most practitioners on grounds of speed alone, and in doing so quietly changed the mathematics of the oracle. Nearly every reading done in the world today uses it.

3
coins
6
throws
1/8
chance of a moving line

The procedure and its variants

The core method takes under a minute to learn. Most of what follows concerns the choices it leaves open and the alternatives that have grown up beside it.

🪙

Three coins, one line

China Tang onward

Throw all three together and read the combination. Six throws build the hexagram from the bottom up, and the whole cast takes about a minute against the yarrow method's hour.

➕

Assigning the values

China Tang onward

Heads count three and tails two, or the reverse depending on convention. The three coins sum to 6, 7, 8 or 9, giving old yin, young yang, young yin and old yang in the same scheme yarrow produces.

🤔

Which side is yang

worldwide contemporary

On traditional Chinese cash the inscribed side is usually taken as yin and the blank side as yang, which reverses what most Western manuals say about heads. What matters is choosing one convention and never varying it.

📊

The flattened odds

worldwide Tang onward

Each moving line comes up one time in eight and each stable line three times in eight, symmetrical between yin and yang. Yarrow makes moving yang three times as likely as moving yin; coins erase that asymmetry entirely.

✳️

Marking the moving lines

worldwide Tang onward

Three heads or three tails give a moving line, marked with a circle or a cross as it is drawn. Mixed throws give stable lines. Flipping the moving ones produces the second hexagram.

⬆️

Building from the bottom

China Zhou onward

The first throw is the bottom line and the sixth is the top, matching how hexagrams are read. Reversing the order is the commonest beginner's error and produces a different figure entirely.

🀄

Traditional cash coins

China Tang onward

Round bronze coins with a square hole, whose shape encodes heaven and earth. Qing-era cash is widely sold for divination, though any three identical coins work equally well.

🎲

Dice methods

worldwide 20th century

A single die read as odd or even reproduces coin odds; three dice or a d8 can be used similarly. Faster than coins and less prone to a coin landing on its edge or rolling under furniture.

🔴

Sixteen-object methods

worldwide 20th century

Beads, marbles or tokens in the proportions three, five, seven and one, drawn one per line. The compromise position: yarrow odds at coin speed, and the honest answer for anyone who thinks the distribution matters.

📱

Software and apps

worldwide 1980s onward

Programs generate lines from a pseudorandom source, usually with coin odds and sometimes with a yarrow option. Practitioners divide sharply over whether an algorithm can stand in for a physical act.

⚛️

Hardware randomness

worldwide contemporary

Some tools draw on atmospheric noise or quantum sources rather than pseudorandom algorithms. Whether this addresses the objection to software casting depends entirely on what one thinks the objection is.

🥉

Single-coin and other shortcuts

worldwide modern

Six throws of one coin give the line types without distinguishing moving lines, so a second pass is needed. Workable, and generally a sign that the reader wants a hexagram rather than a reading.

Materials, history and objections

Where the method came from, what people cast with, and the long-running argument about what was lost when the stalks were put away.

The Tang shift

7th to 10th century China

Coin casting is generally traced to the Tang period, when a fast alternative to the stalks came into wide use. No single origin text survives, and the change appears to have been practical rather than doctrinal.

Wen Wang Gua practice

Han onward China

The dominant professional Chinese method uses three coins as a matter of course, since its analysis depends on branches and phases rather than on the fine distribution of moving lines.

Zhu Xi's preference

12th century Fujian

Zhu Xi codified the yarrow ritual in detail and treated it as the proper method, which is much of why the stalks retained prestige even after coins had won on convenience.

Wilhelm-Baynes

1950 the West

The edition that introduced most Western readers to both methods, describing the coin procedure as the quicker option. Its influence is why English-speaking practice defaults to coins.

The round coin, the square hole

Chinese tradition China

Cash coins are read as a diagram in themselves, the round rim heaven and the square aperture earth. It is a pleasing rationale for a choice originally made because the coins were in everyone's pocket.

The probability objection

20th century onward worldwide

The best-documented criticism of coins: the two methods produce measurably different distributions, so they are not interchangeable. Defenders reply that the meaning lies in the interpretation, not the frequency.

The bead compromise

20th century the West

Popularised in Western manuals as a way to keep yarrow's odds without its hour. Sixteen objects in the right ratio, drawn and replaced, one draw per line.

Chance in art

1951 onward New York

John Cage cast hexagrams to make compositional choices, and later used computer-generated numbers for the same purpose. An early instance of substituting an algorithm for the physical cast.

Divination apps

2010s onward worldwide

Phone apps have made casting effectively frictionless, which some practitioners regard as the method's completion and others as the loss of the pause that made consultation deliberate.

Choosing your coins

contemporary worldwide

Any three identical coins serve. Practitioners often keep a dedicated set, which addresses the practical question of remembering which face was assigned to yang as much as any ritual one.

Practical failures

perennial everywhere

Coins land on edge, roll away or fall off the table. Convention is simply to throw again; nothing in the tradition treats a failed throw as an omen.

The yarrow method

Zhou onward China

The slow original, with its asymmetric odds and its ritual frame. Many practitioners keep it for questions they judge to warrant an hour, and use coins for everything else.

The method in one paragraph

Take three coins. Decide which face is yang worth three and which is yin worth two, and do not change your mind afterwards. Throw all three at once and add the values: the sum will be 6, 7, 8 or 9. Six is a moving yin line, nine a moving yang, seven and eight the stable forms. Draw the line, throw again, and build the hexagram from the bottom up in six throws. Flip any moving lines to get the second hexagram.

That is the whole procedure. It takes about a minute, which is the entire reason it exists.

Which face is yang?

This confuses more beginners than anything else, and the honest answer is that there is no universal rule. Chinese practice with traditional cash coins generally treats the inscribed side as yin and the plain side as yang. Western manuals, working with modern coinage, usually assign heads to yang.

The two conventions are not reconcilable and it does not matter. What matters is that you fix a convention before you begin and never vary it within or between readings. Practitioners who keep a dedicated set of coins are, among other things, solving the problem of remembering which way round they decided.

What the coins changed

The coin method is not simply a faster yarrow. It is a different randomiser, and the difference is measurable.

With three coins, each of the four outcomes has a clean probability: one in eight for a moving yang, one in eight for a moving yin, three in eight for each stable line. The distribution is symmetrical between yin and yang.

Yarrow is not symmetrical. It gives moving yang three times in sixteen and moving yin once in sixteen, so a changing yang line is three times as likely as a changing yin one, and stable yin is much the commonest outcome. Cast a thousand questions each way and the answers will differ systematically.

Whether this matters is genuinely disputed. One camp holds that the asymmetry encodes something real about how yang and yin behave, and that flattening it changes the oracle. The other holds that meaning arises in the interpretation and that the input distribution is incidental. Both include people who have practised for decades.

If you find the argument persuasive but cannot spare an hour, the sixteen-object method settles it: beads or tokens in the proportions three, five, seven and one, drawn once per line, reproducing yarrow's distribution at coin speed.

Beyond coins

Dice work, and avoid the coin that lands on its edge or rolls under the sofa. A single die read as odd or even gives the same odds as a coin, and various three-die and eight-sided schemes are in use.

Software has made casting effectively instantaneous. Most programs implement coin odds, some offer a yarrow option, and a few draw on hardware randomness from atmospheric or quantum noise rather than a pseudorandom algorithm. The objection to software casting is rarely really about randomness quality; it is about whether an oracle needs a physical act and an interval of attention to work. That is not a question a better random number generator answers.

Where this leaves the practitioner

Coins are the mainstream method and have been for over a thousand years. Wen Wang Gua, the dominant professional practice in Chinese-speaking regions, uses them as standard, because its analysis rests on the branches and phases attached to the lines rather than on the fine grain of the moving-line distribution.

A reasonable working position, and the one much of Chinese practice has taken since the Tang, is to use coins by default and reserve the stalks for questions that seem to deserve the hour. Nothing in the tradition requires purism, and no ancient text prescribes coins or forbids them, since they postdate the classic by a millennium.

Frequently asked questions

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