ZHOU YI · 64 HEXAGRAMS
Cast a hexagram. Read an old text. Think one thing through.
Three traditional casting methods, with the full text of all sixty-four hexagrams and line-by-line commentary. Here the oracle is not a prediction — it is a mirror that makes your question visible.
Choose a casting method
What this is
This site does one small thing: it lets you cast a hexagram by a traditional method, and then read the text of the Book of Changes properly.
The Zhou Yi took shape in the Western Zhou and is among the oldest Chinese classics. It consists of sixty-four hexagrams, sixty-four judgements and three hundred and eighty-four line statements, around which later centuries accumulated the commentaries known as the Ten Wings. For more than two thousand years it has been read simultaneously as a divination manual, a work of philosophy, and a source of political and ethical argument.
Our position is straightforward. What is valuable in the Book of Changes is not whether it can foretell anything, but the extraordinarily compressed vocabulary of situation it provides. Hexagram 1 moves through six words — hidden, appearing, wary, poised, flying, overreaching — and in doing so describes the whole arc of an undertaking from dormancy to excess. When you place your own question inside that vocabulary, you are forced to redescribe it. That act of redescription is usually more useful than any answer.
The texts follow the received edition. Corrections are welcome.
What kind of question is it?
The topic changes the angle of the reading, not the hexagram itself.
State the question clearly
The more specific the question, the better the text will meet it. What you write stays in your browser — it is never sent anywhere and never stored.
If it is an ID, a card or another important item, or you suspect theft, report it first and consult the oracle after. If a person or a pet is missing, contact the police or the relevant service immediately — that is not something divination can handle.
How the oracle is asked
Hexagram 4 says: at the first asking I inform you; ask two or three times and it is importunity, and importunity gets no answer. One question, one casting. Do not ask what you do not sincerely doubt.
The Plum Blossom method casts from numbers. Use the present moment, or simply name two numbers.
Prefilled from the Gregorian date. The tradition usually takes the month and day from the Chinese lunar calendar — if you follow that, enter the lunar month and day here instead.
This hexagram on your question
If it is an ID, a card or another important item, or you suspect theft, report it first and consult the oracle after. If a person or a pet is missing, contact the police or the relevant service immediately — that is not something divination can handle.