I Ching is one of the oldest books of Ancient China. It's based on the cosmology of yin and yang, the fundamental opposite forces of the universe, and applies it on divination in a system of 64 hexagrams. You find them all on this website, together with explanations to them and to this system of divination.

     Here are all the hexagrams.

In divination with I Ching, you have a question on your mind and you get a hexagram - by flipping coins or in the traditional Chinese way with sticks. That hexagram, with its accompanying explanatory text, is the answer. Quite simple - but you'll be surprised at the relevance and accuracy of the answers. Try it out:

     I Ching Online Reading

I Ching (also spelled Yi Jing) dates back to at least 1000 BC. Its content may have its origin as much as a millennium or two earlier than that. The title means The Book of Change, and although it's a stringent text, seemingly emerged from one mind, its author is unknown to us.

     The book contains 64 chapters, each devoted to one of 64 hexagrams - diagrams of six (hex is Greek for six) lines that are either solid or split in two. The 64 are simply all of the possible combinations of solid and split lines for the hexagrams. You can see all of them on the image above.

     The book was compiled to be used for divination. The Chinese population used coins or special sticks to allow for chance to decide what hexagram would answer whatever question about the future they might have had. The text that accompanies and explains the hexagram would be the answer.

     This divination technique also marks some of the six lines, which have their own explanatory texts stating something more precise about the situation. So, the hexagram gives the general idea, whereas the marked lines give some specifics.

     This system of divination is still in wide use today, also far outside China. I've used it many times and found it very rewarding. Contrary to many other systems of divination, it speaks through words, and so do we. That makes it sur­prisingly easy to apply to personal circumstances.

     Translations of the book reviewed here.

I Ching simply means The Book of Change, which refers to a way of looking at the world as a whole. Everything changes, nothing stays the same - that's the only thing we can know for sure.

     It's still quite true, no matter what science tries so hard to make us believe. Our understanding of the universe and our own roles in it are evolving. Well, honestly, sometimes increasing, but sometimes getting it altogether wrong. The problem is that only by time are we able to make our conclusions, and even then with the reservation of what the future of that future might reveal.

     Destiny, too, is a consequence of the ceaseless change. Without change, nothing would happen.

In I Ching, the ceaseless change is caused by the dynamics between yin and yang, the polarities of ancient Chinese cosmology. Yang stands for heaven and Yin for earth. Light and dark, warm and cold, and so on. Anything in the universe bascially consists of these opposites, and the balance or imbalance between them.

     More about yin and yang here.

In I Ching, Yin and Yang are represented in a very basic way, by a line that's either solid or broken. The solid line represents Yang, and the broken one Yin:

Yang line.

Yin line.

     These are combined into eight trigrams (three lines each), which are then combined into the 64 possible hexagrams. Here are the eight trigrams:

The eight trigrams.

     More about the trigrams here.

I've seen on the Internet that nowadays, I Ching is claimed to be linked to Taoism, as if springing from that line of thought. It's not very accurate. I Ching is much older than we know Taoism to be, and it's still not even referred to in the major Taoist classic, Tao Te Ching.

     True, Taoism makes use of Yin and Yang in its cosmology, regarding them as primary powers in the very birth of the universe and onwards. But so did just about every other Chinese philosophy of the time and long before it. No, I Ching is an entity that had been around for very long when Taoism was put into words.

     Actually, the traditional philosophical Taoists would probably object to the idea of a predictable destiny, at least by principles different in essence from that of Tao, the Way, itself. They preferred a surprising future, to which the only safe direction would be remaining on the Way, no matter what.

     More about Taoism here.

Today, just about every educated person would sneer at divination and claim that there is no way to predict the future. That may be hasty, since so many things about our universe are quite predictable - even the mightiest of them all: the movements of the heavenly bodies.

     I started experimenting with different techniques of divination when I was quite young - and just as doubtful. What I experienced struck hard on my doubts. I found the future not only foreseeable, be it in a symbolic way some­times difficult to interpret, but very easily accessible. The future opened its bosom readily, like a lover.

     Most divination techniques involve chance - pure randomness. That's true for I Ching as well. And chance is the greatest enigma of them all.

     In a universe bound by law of nature it can't exist. Chance is nothing but the limit of our knowledge of how the world works. If we have the formulas, we should be able to compute the future. Paradoxically, methods of chance seem to penetrate areas of the future that our formulas don't, as if the essential law of the cosmos is founded on chance. Well, quantum physics seems to be heading towards such a universe.

     Anyway, among the divination techniques, I've found I Ching to be one of the most rewarding. I guess it's because it speaks with words, like our whole species prefers to do. That makes the predictions accessible and surprisingly obvious to us. If you've tried it, I'm sure you agree.

     Oh, one more thing: Although the future is so easily accessible by many divination methods, there's one occasion in which they all fail. They will not tell us what we should do to fulfill our personal quests or to find our own answers to that tremendously elusive question about the meaning of life. They refuse to. That, we have to find out for ourselves, each and every one of us. Why not? That's what makes life such a fascinating journey.