← the temple the Zhou Yi · China, about 800 BC, with the Wings · Legge, 1882
Sixty-four figures of six lines, whole or broken, and a short text for each and for each line: the oldest book of divination still in use, and the one that works by arithmetic. Ask, and the page casts six lines from the bottom up by the odds the yarrow stalks give (an old yin one time in sixteen, a young yang five, a young yin seven, an old yang three), or by three coins if you prefer the even odds, or takes six numbers you threw yourself. The old lines move: they are marked, and the hexagram they turn into is drawn beside the first. The Judgment and the moving lines are read from the Chinese text, which is on the shelf, with a plain gloss of the Judgment; Legge's whole translation is on the shelf too, for the rest.
in King Wen's order, the order of the book; tap one to read it unmoving
The Zhou Yi, the Changes of Zhou, is a Bronze Age handbook of omens: sixty-four hexagrams, each named, each with a Judgment, each line with a sentence, set down in the early first millennium BC from older stalk-divination and fixed in the order King Wen is said to have given it. The Ten Wings, the commentaries that make it a book of philosophy rather than a table of omens, were added over the following centuries and credited to Confucius; the Image, the sentence beginning xiang yue under each hexagram, is from them, and so is the whole apparatus of trigrams, families and directions. The eight trigrams are heaven, earth, thunder, water, mountain, wind, fire and lake; a hexagram is one over another, and within it a nuclear hexagram is made of its middle four lines. Leibniz saw the binary numbers in the Fu Xi arrangement in 1701 and was pleased; the hexagram is, in fact, a six-bit number, and the page keeps it as one.
How it is cast. Fifty yarrow stalks, one set aside, the rest divided and counted off by fours three times for each line: a slow and uneven procedure whose outcomes are six, seven, eight or nine with the odds given above, weighted so that a moving yang is three times as likely as a moving yin. Three coins, the later shortcut, give the same four outcomes at two in eight, six, six and two. A seven or an eight is a young line and stays; a six or a nine is old, has reached its extreme, and turns into its opposite, which is what the word changes means. When lines move the book is read twice: the first hexagram for the situation and the lines that move within it, the second for where it tends. Which moving line to weigh when several move is a rule of thumb from Zhu Xi's school, given with the reading. The glosses of the Judgments are this site's own, kept close to the Chinese and to Legge; the lines are left in the Chinese, with Legge beside them on the shelf, since sixty-four Judgments is a page's worth and three hundred and eighty-four lines is a book's.
The Chinese text is Project Gutenberg's 易經 (#25501), public domain; James Legge, The Yî King, Sacred Books of the East vol. XVI, Oxford, 1882, public domain, is on the shelf as the Yî King from a scan at the Internet Archive. The casting, the drawing and the glosses are this site's own. One script.