☰I Ching

Cast a hexagram with three coins — held and shaken in your hands, then let go — or with the forty-nine yarrow stalks, divided by your own hand if you like, each heap counted off by fours before your eyes (worked as the three changes, with the traditional chances) or with coins of your own, and ask a question. See the situation, the lines that change, the hexagram it becomes and its hidden core, and which text to read by Zhu Xi's rules. Browse all 64 by number, by their trigrams or in the binary order, each with its pair, its opposite and its core; and learn the trigrams, the two rings of the Bagua, the six places in a hexagram and the chances behind coins and yarrow. The 64 can also be seen in Shao Yong's circle, the diagram Bouvet sent to Leibniz, each hexagram read as a binary number with its opposite across the circle. Change any line of a hexagram to walk to the next, see the six it becomes when a single line moves, and set yourself a goal to walk to, the lines still to change marked as a cast's changing lines are. Watch the tide of the year in the twelve sovereign hexagrams: yang coming back at the winter solstice with Return and rising a line a month to the Creative, then yin coming in at the summer solstice, with the Sun among them now and the months' dates this year — play the year round to watch the lines rise and fall. Cast without coins by Plum Blossom numerology: the moment's numbers in the old calendar, the clock's, or two you give, make a hexagram with one moving line, read first by Body and Use through the five phases. And learn the sixty-four by doing — name one from its figure or its trigrams, or build it line by line, with an eight-by-eight table colouring in as you go.