The text of what ancient classic is a set of oracular statements represented by 64 sets of six hexagrams, with each hexagram in turn composed of six lines of Yangs or Yins?
"I Ching divination Among the many forms of divination is a cleromancy method using the I Ching (易經, ""yì jīng"") or ""Book of Changes"". ""I Ching"" consists of sixty-four hexagrams and commentary upon those symbols. Each hexagram is six lines, each one of which is either ""yin"" (represented by a broken line) or ""yang"" (a solid line). By randomly generating the six lines by one or other of various methods and then reading the commentary associated with the resulting hexagram, the sense(s) of that commentary is (are) then used as an oracle. Certain schools of Chinese philosophy (such as the"
"King Wen sequence The King Wen sequence () is an arrangement of the sixty-four divination figures in 易經 Yì Jīng, the I Ching or Book of Changes. They are called ""hexagrams"" in English because each figure is composed of six 爻 yáo—broken or unbroken lines, that represent 陰 yin or 陽 yang respectively. The King Wen sequence is also known as the ""received"" or ""classical"" sequence because it is the oldest surviving arrangement of the hexagrams. Its true age and authorship are unknown. Traditionally, it is said that 周文王 Zhōu Wén Wáng (King Wen) arranged the hexagrams in this sequence"
"practice, this text later became of philosophical importance to Daoism and Confucianism. The ""I Ching"" itself, shorn of its commentaries, consists of 64 combinations of 8 trigrams (called ""hexagrams""), traditionally chosen by throwing coins or yarrow sticks, to give the diviner some idea of the situation at hand and, through reading of the ""changing lines"", some idea of what is developing. The 64 original notations of the hexagrams in the ""IChing"" can also be read as a meditation on how change occurs, so it assists Taoists with managing yin and yang cycles as Laozi advocated in the ""Tao Te Ching"""
"were derived from the hexagram names. The line statements, which make up most of the book, are exceedingly cryptic. Each line begins with a word indicating the line number, ""base, 2, 3, 4, 5, top"", and either the number 6 for a broken line, or the number 9 for a whole line. Hexagrams 1 and 2 have an extra line statement, named ""yong"". Following the line number, the line statements may make oracular or prognostic statements. Some line statements also contain poetry or references to historical events. Archaeological evidence shows that Zhou dynasty divination was grounded in cleromancy, the production"
"verses. The verses represent all the possible combinations of the sixty-four hexagrams of the Book of Changes (Yi Jing/I Ching), thus 64 X 64 = 4096. Many of the verses of the Yi Lin were apparently lost over time and only approximately 1500 verses are unique, with the remaining verses full or partial duplicates. The verses are most often two couplets of four characters each. Some verses are as short as three lines and some as long as eight. Many of the longer verses have orphaned couplets at the end that do not seem to fit with the first two"
"is not unknown for experienced soothsayers to ignore the text, interpreting the oracle from the pictures created by the lines, bigrams, trigrams, and final hexagram. Several of the methods of consultation produce one number (6, 7, 8, or 9, corresponding to ""old yin"", ""young yang"", ""young yin"", and ""old yang"", respectively) per application of a more or less complex procedure, so that six passes through the procedure are required to generate one hexagram (or two hexagrams, if the first has any changing lines). Simpler (and sometimes less traditional) procedures can also be used. Several of the methods described below ""force"""
"the 56 invertible hexagrams plus the 8 non-invertible. Over the centuries there were many attempts to explain this sequence. Some basic elements are obvious: each symbol is paired with an ""upside-down"" neighbor, except for 1, 27, 29, and 61 which are ""vertically"" symmetrical and paired with ""inversed"" neighbors. A combinatorial mathematical basis was explained for the first time in 2006. King Wen sequence The King Wen sequence () is an arrangement of the sixty-four divination figures in 易經 Yì Jīng, the I Ching or Book of Changes. They are called ""hexagrams"" in English because each figure is composed of six"
"""zhi"" was interpreted as a verb meaning ""moving to"", an apparent indication that hexagrams could be transformed into other hexagrams. However, there are no instances of ""changeable lines"" in the ""Zuo zhuan"". In all 12 out of 12 line statements quoted, the original hexagrams are used to produce the oracle. In 136 BC, Emperor Wu of Han named the ""Zhou yi"" ""the first among the classics"", dubbing it the ""Classic of Changes"" or ""I Ching"". Emperor Wu's placement of the ""I Ching"" among the Five Classics was informed by a broad span of cultural influences that included Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism,"
"King Wen of Zhou, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius, but this traditional attribution is no longer generally accepted. The basic unit of the ""Zhou yi"" is the hexagram (卦 ""guà""), a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines (爻 ""yáo""). Each line is either broken or unbroken. The received text of the ""Zhou yi"" contains all 64 possible hexagrams, along with the hexagram's name (卦名 ""guàmíng""), a short hexagram statement (彖 ""tuàn""), and six line statements (爻辭 ""yáocí""). The statements were used to determine the results of divination, but the reasons for having two different methods of reading the"
"School of Yin-Yang, whose tenets were largely adopted by Taoism, though both are centuries younger than ""I Ching"") maintain that powerful old yin will eventually turn to young yang and ""vice versa"", so in addition to lines' being considered either ""yin"" or ""yang"", they are also either ""young"" (i.e., stable) or ""old"" (i.e., changing); any hexagram that contains ""old yin"" or ""old yang"" lines (both being referred to as ""moving lines"") thus also produces a second, different hexagram in which the moving lines of the first hexagram become their opposites (i.e., ""old yin"" becomes ""yang"", and ""old yang"" becomes ""yin"")."
"sequence. The interpretation of the readings found in the ""I Ching"" is a matter of centuries of debate, and many commentators have used the book symbolically, often to provide guidance for moral decision making as informed by Taoism and Confucianism. The hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing. The core of the ""I Ching"" is a Western Zhou divination text called the ""Changes of Zhou"" (周易 ""Zhōu yì""). Various modern scholars suggest dates ranging between the 10th and 4th centuries"
"is either doubled or has the first number added back into it; the order in which these steps are to be performed is given by the binary representation of the second number. This method can be seen in use, for instance, in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, which dates to around 1650 BC. The I Ching dates from the 9th century BC in China. The binary notation in the ""I Ching"" is used to interpret its quaternary divination technique. It is based on taoistic duality of yin and yang. eight trigrams (Bagua) and a set of 64 hexagrams (""sixty-four"" gua), analogous"
"or ""King Wen"" bagua. The trigrams have correspondences in astronomy, astrology, geography, geomancy, anatomy, the family, and elsewhere. The ancient Chinese classic, I Ching (Pinyin: Yi Jing), consists of the 64 pairwise permutations of trigrams, referred to as ""hexagrams"", along with commentary on each one. There are two possible sources of ""bagua"". The first is from traditional Yin and Yang philosophy. This is explained by Fuxi in the following way: Another possible source of ""bagua"" is the following, attributed to King Wen of Zhou Dynasty: ""When the world began, there was heaven and earth. Heaven mated with the earth and"
"form of the phenomenal world. Straight line with no break (一) represents 'yang', and Line with a break in the center (--) represents 'yin(negative)'. One yang sign and two yin sign can be united and two yang sign and one yin sign can be united and each is one of trigrams. The Eight Trigrams for divination is explained all nature phenomenon. Complex pattern is pattern showing many compounded subjects. For instance, to emphasize the auspicious nature of the dragon, a symbol of defense against evil spirits, it can depicted with clouds. Also, putting apricot blossoms, which represents spring and longevity,"
"I Ching The I Ching (; ), also known as Classic of Changes or Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text and the oldest of the Chinese classics. Possessing a history of more than two and a half millennia of commentary and interpretation, the ""I Ching"" is an influential text read throughout the world, providing inspiration to the worlds of religion, psychoanalysis, literature, and art. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000750), over the course of the Warring States period and early imperial period (500200) it was transformed into a cosmological text with a series"
"opposite of the other transition within the pair. The I Ching book was traditionally split up in two parts with the first part covering the first 30 hexagrams of the King Wen sequence and the second part with the remaining 34. The reason for this was not mentioned in the classic commentaries but was explained in later Yuan dynasty commentaries: 8 hexagrams are the same when turned upside down and the other 56 present a different hexagram if inverted. This allows the hexagrams to be displayed succinctly in two equal columns or rows of 18 unique hexagrams each; half of"
"one, there is a bit of folk wisdom on tigers and hedgehogs. Then comes the reference to Yu the Great, tamer of floods and founder of the Xia Dynasty. The verse uses an image from Chinese mythology in which Yu is supposed to have carved out a mountain as part of his herculean labors changing the flood pattern of China. Later diviners made use of various techniques to determine one or both of the hexagrams for an Yi Lin reading. These often included drawing trigram images from the world around them and the events they were inquiring about and using"
"hexagram are not known, and it is not known why hexagram statements would be read over line statements or vice versa. The book opens with the first hexagram statement, ""yuán hēng lì zhēn"" (元亨利貞). These four words, translated traditionally by James Legge as ""originating and penetrating, advantageous and firm,"" are often repeated in the hexagram statements and were already considered an important part of ""I Ching"" interpretation in the 6th century BC. Edward Shaughnessy describes this statement as affirming an ""initial receipt"" of an offering, ""beneficial"" for further ""divining"". The word ""zhēn"" (貞, ancient form ) was also used for"
"lines each of which may be broken or unbroken), the ""Taixuanjing"" employs 81 ternary tetragrams (sequences of four lines, each of which may be unbroken, broken once, or broken twice). Like the ""I Ching"" it may be consulted as an oracle by casting yarrow stalks or a six-faced die to generate numbers which define the lines of a tetragram, which can then be looked up in the text. A tetragram drawn without moving lines refers to the tetragram description, while a tetragram drawn with moving lines refers to the specific lines. The monograms are: Numerically the symbols can counted as"
"yang are represented by broken and solid lines: yin is broken (⚋) and yang is solid (⚊). These are then combined into trigrams, which are more yang (""e.g."" ☱) or more yin (""e.g."" ☵) depending on the number of broken and solid lines (""e.g."", ☰ is heavily yang, while ☷ is heavily yin), and trigrams are combined into hexagrams (""e.g."" ䷕ and ䷟). The relative positions and numbers of yin and yang lines within the trigrams determines the meaning of a trigram, and in hexagrams the upper trigram is considered yang with respect to the lower trigram, yin, which allows"
"and ninety-two Chengs. Each Gua is clearly distinctive. The style of Tian family's Yin Yang Bagua Zhang is integrated with the soft and the hard, powerful and majestic—transmitting China's exquisite traditional culture. Tian family's Yin Yang Bagua Zhang took the meaning of Yin Yang and the Eight Trigrams and applied it to the theories and principles of the palms. The actions of the Yin Yang Bagua Zhang eight forms routine involve the practitioners adjusting the upper, middle and lower sections of their body. The Eight Trigrams are eight different symbols: Qian (乾), Kan (坎), Gen (艮), Zhen (震), Xun (巽),"
"""Daoist Canon"" includes several textual editions of varying lengths. The core of the ""Wuzhen pian"" comprises 81 poems: 16 heptasyllabic ""lüshi"" 律詩 ""regulated poems"", 64 heptasyllabic ""jueju"" 絕句 ""stopped-short line"" quatrains, and one pentasyllabic verse on the ""Taiyi"" 太一 ""Great Unity"". Both 16 (= 2 x 8) and 64 (= 8 x 8) have numerological significance, the former denotes two equal ""8 ounce"" measures of Yin and Yang (alchemical allusions for mercury and lead) totaling ""16 ounces"" (one ""jin"" 斤 ""catty""), and the latter correlates with the 64 Yijing hexagrams. Zhang later appended the ""Wuzhen pian"" text with 12 alchemical"
"simplified form. All pinyin terms are rendered without tone marks, but are otherwise according to the orthographic rules in Appendix I of ""ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary"" but contemporary pinyin book titles are as published. Huangdi Neijing Huangdi Neijing (), literally the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor or Esoteric Scripture of the Yellow Emperor, is an ancient Chinese medical text that has been treated as the fundamental doctrinal source for Chinese medicine for more than two millennia. The work is composed of two texts—each of eighty-one chapters or treatises in a question-and-answer format between the mythical Yellow Emperor and six"
"were presented. Nearly two thirds of this Shuanggudui ""Yijing"" consist in ""formulaic divination statements"" that are present neither in the received ""Yijing"", nor in the version that was found in Mawangdui that was also sealed in the 160s BCE. Edward Shaughnessy has hypothesized that the line statements of the received ""Book of Changes"" may have originated in similar but older divination statements. More than 170 fragments of the ""Classic of Poetry"" or ""Book of Odes"", for a total of 820 characters, have also been found in Shuanggudui. These fragments are longer and have been more extensively studied than other incomplete"
"the nine works themselves vary depending on the source. The Kaicheng Stone Classics (833–837) comprise twelve works (all the above except the ""Mencius""). By the time of the Southern Song dynasty, the number and specific books in the ""thirteen classics"" were universally established. The Thirteen Classics formed the texts used in the Imperial examinations, and their 600,000+ characters, in effect words, were generally required to be memorized in order to pass. Thirteen Classics The Thirteen Classics () is a term for the group of thirteen classics of Confucian tradition that became the basis for the Imperial Examinations during the Song"
"of the Mutations of the Tao with the Yin and the Yang"" are 27 three-line diagrams known as 'trigrams', which are composed of a solid line for the Yang, a broken line for the Yin, and a point for the Tao. By attributing 26 Roman script letters to the trigrams of this work, Crowley felt that he had fulfilled the injunction to ""obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet"", as noted in his 'Old Comment' to The Book of the Law. Crowley did not go on to develop a full qabalah from this work, but many subsequent qabalists"
"from the eternal oneness of the universe through three bifurcations. The other Wings provide different perspectives on essentially the same viewpoint, giving ancient, cosmic authority to the ""I Ching"". For example, the ""Wenyan"" provides a moral interpretation that parallels the first two hexagrams, 乾 (qián) and 坤 (kūn), with Heaven and Earth, and the ""Shuogua"" attributes to the symbolic function of the hexagrams the ability to understand self, world, and destiny. Throughout the Ten Wings, there are passages that seem to purposefully increase the ambiguity of the base text, pointing to a recognition of multiple layers of symbolism. The ""Great"
"attempts to reconstruct Zhou period readings. The most commonly used English translations of the ""I Ching"" are: Other notable English translations include: I Ching The I Ching (; ), also known as Classic of Changes or Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text and the oldest of the Chinese classics. Possessing a history of more than two and a half millennia of commentary and interpretation, the ""I Ching"" is an influential text read throughout the world, providing inspiration to the worlds of religion, psychoanalysis, literature, and art. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000750), over"
"of seemingly random numbers to determine divine intent. The ""Zhou yi"" provided a guide to cleromancy that used the stalks of the yarrow plant, but it is not known how the yarrow stalks became numbers, or how specific lines were chosen from the line readings. In the hexagrams, broken lines were used as shorthand for the numbers 6 (六) and 8 (八), and solid lines were shorthand for values of 7 (七) and 9 (九). The ""Great Commentary"" contains a late classic description of a process where various numerological operations are performed on a bundle of 50 stalks, leaving remainders"
"Taixuanjing The text Tài Xuán Jīng (""Canon of Supreme Mystery"", ) was composed by the Confucian writer Yang Xiong (53 BCE-18 CE). The first draft of this work was completed in 2 BCE (in the decade before the fall of the Western Han dynasty). During the Jin dynasty, an otherwise unknown person named Fan Wang () salvaged the text and wrote a commentary on it, from which our text survives today. The ""Taixuanjing"" is a divinatory text similar to, and inspired by, the ""I Ching"" (""Yijing""). Whereas the ""I Ching"" is based on 64 binary hexagrams (sequences of six horizontal"
"Ching"", the hexagrams are arranged in an order dubbed the King Wen sequence after King Wen of Zhou, who founded the Zhou dynasty and supposedly reformed the method of interpretation. The sequence generally pairs hexagrams with their upside-down equivalents, although in eight cases hexagrams are paired with their inversion. Another order, found at Mawangdui in 1973, arranges the hexagrams into eight groups sharing the same upper trigram. But the oldest known manuscript, found in 1987 and now held by the Shanghai Library, was almost certainly arranged in the King Wen sequence, and it has even been proposed that a pottery"
"Guicang Guicang (歸藏, ""Return to the Hidden"") is a divination text dating to the Zhou dynasty, which was once used in place of the ""I Ching"". The text of ""Guicang"" was rediscovered in a rural bog in 1993; it had been lost for roughly two thousand years. ""Guicang"" contains the sixty-four hexagrams and stories relating to each of them. For example, Hexagram 54 of the ""I Ching"", ""Returning Maiden"", is accompanied by the story of how the maiden Chang'e stole the medicine of immortality from the Xi Wangmu and, upon returning home, used the hexagrams to determine that she should"
"paddle from the Western Zhou period contains four hexagrams in the King Wen sequence. Whichever of these arrangements is older, it is not evident that the order of the hexagrams was of interest to the original authors of the ""Zhou yi"". The assignment of numbers, binary or decimal, to specific hexagrams is a modern invention. The following table numbers the hexagrams in King Wen order. The Sinologist Michael Nylan describes the ""I Ching"" as the best-known Chinese book in the world. In East Asia, it is a foundational text for the Confucian and Daoist philosophical traditions, while in the West,"