I Ching divination

The text of the I Ching consists of sixty-four hexagrams: six-line figures of yin (broken) or yang (solid) lines, and commentaries on them.

The method used by the diviner to generate the hexagram(s) depends on their circumstances and beliefs; the yarrow-stalk method is usually employed by traditionalists who find significance in its complexity, and in the resulting time needed to manipulate the stalks to produce a hexagram.

There are also methods to generate a hexagram by interpreting the time, direction, person, etc., instead of throwing coins or dividing and counting yarrow stalks.

The diviner would apply heat to a piece of a turtle shell (sometimes with a hot poker), and interpret the resulting cracks.

This oracle predated the earliest versions of the Zhou Yi (dated from about 1100 BC) by hundreds of years.[relevant?]

These are usually genuine Achillea millefolium stalks that have been cut and prepared for such purposes, or any form of wooden rod or sticks (the quality ranging from cheap hardwood to very expensive red sandalwood, etc.)

[1] The forty-nine stalks are then gathered and the entire procedure repeated to generate each of the remaining five lines of the hexagram.

The yarrow-stalk method produces unequal probabilities[2][3] for obtaining each of the four totals, as shown in the table.

The quickest, easiest, and most popular method by far, it has largely supplanted yarrow stalks, but produces outcomes with different likelihoods.

First, while maintaining the probabilities of the traditional yarrow-stalk method, it simplifies outcomes such that they become intuitive at first sight, without need of further calculations.

Third, it is easy to memorize, as it clearly identifies heads with yang, and tails with yin, and a greater share of heads/tails with old (aka mature, moving, changing) yang/yin.

The modified two-coin method involves tossing one pair of coins of different size or shape.

It is considered simplified as it reduces the number of throws and calculations needed to correctly identify the outcome of each hexagram line, compared to any other method.

While this has its advantages, some purists consider the time required to build the hexagram as a fundamental aspect of I Ching divination, for its ceremonial as well as introspective purposes.

They are picked up in order and placed onto a Bagua diagram; the marked coin rests on the lower trigram.

Any dice with an even number of faces can also be used in the same fashion as the coin tosses, with even die rolls for heads and odd for tails.

There is a tradition of Taoist thought which explores numerology, esoteric cosmology, astrology and feng shui in connection with the I Ching.

The Han period (206 BCE-220 CE)… saw the combination and correlation of the I Ching, particularly in its structural aspects of line, trigrams, and hexagrams, with the yin-yang and wu hsing (Five Element) theories of the cosmologists, with numerical patterns and speculations, with military theory, and, rather more nebulously, with the interests of the fang-shih or "Masters of Techniques," who ranged over many areas, from practical medicine, through alchemy and astrology, to the occult and beyond.The eleventh-century Neo-Confucian philosopher Shao Yung contributed advanced methods of divination including the Plum Blossom Yi Numerology, a horary astrology[4] that takes into account the number of calligraphic brush strokes of one's query.

[4] Another modern development incorporates the planetary positions of one's natal horoscope against the backdrop of Shao Yung's circular Fu Xi arrangement and the Western zodiac to provide multiple hexagrams corresponding to each of the planets.

While a hexagram is derived with one of the common methods like coin or yarrow stalks, here the divination is not interpreted on the basis of the classic I Ching text.

Instead, this system connects each of the six hexagram lines to one of the Twelve Earthly Branches, and then the picture can be analyzed with the use of 5 Elements (Wu Xing).

As such, Wen Wang Gua makes a bridge between I Ching and the Four Pillars of Destiny.

This has the theoretical advantage of improving randomness aspects of consulting the I Ching ("not-doing" in the personal sense, enhancing the "universal" principle).

A JavaScript version of the Yarrow Stalk method, which generates slightly different probabilities, is available in open source form at GitHub.

However, the calculation of the frequencies for the yarrow-stalk method—generally believed to be the same as those described in this article in the simplified method using sixteen objects—contains a further error, in the opinion of Andrew Kennedy,[10] which is that of including the selection of zero as a quantity for either hand.