A Beginner's Guide
How to Read the I Ching: A Beginner's Guide to Casting Hexagrams
The first time I threw three coins onto my kitchen table to ask the I Ching a question, I felt slightly ridiculous. I was thirty-one, I did not believe in fortune-telling, and I was doing it anyway — because I had a decision I couldn't think my way out of, and I had run out of clever ideas.
What surprised me was not that the book was right. It's not a machine for predicting the future, and anyone who sells it that way is selling you something. What surprised me was that reading it slowed me down. It made me sit with a question long enough to notice what I actually felt about it. Six years later I still keep three old coins in a dish by the door, and I want to tell you how the whole thing works — plainly, from the beginning, the way I wish someone had told me.
So here is how to read the I Ching, from someone who came to it skeptical and stayed anyway.
What the I Ching actually is
The I Ching — 易经, also written Yijing, and usually translated as the Book of Changes — is one of the oldest books in the world still in daily use. Its core dates back roughly three thousand years, to the Western Zhou dynasty, when it was a manual of divination; over the following centuries Confucian scholars layered it with commentary until it became something closer to a book of philosophy about how situations move and transform. If you want the scholarly overview, the Wikipedia entry on the I Ching is a good, sober place to start.
Here is the part that matters for actually using it. The book is built entirely out of 64 hexagrams — sixty-four six-line figures, each one a small diagram of a situation. You ask a question, you generate one of those sixty-four figures more or less at random, and you read what that figure has to say. That's the whole mechanism.
The randomness is the point: it interrupts the story you're already telling yourself and hands you an image you didn't choose.
When people ask me why bother, I say this. Most of the time we already know more than we admit. The I Ching doesn't give you information from outside — it gives you a structured way to hear what you've been avoiding. Whether you read that as chance, as the unconscious, or as something older and stranger is, honestly, up to you. It works either way.
Sixty-four hexagrams, six lines each
Every hexagram is made of six stacked lines, and each line is one of two kinds: a solid line, which is yang — active, bright, outward, giving; or a broken line, which is yin — receptive, dark, inward, yielding.
Stack six of them and you get a hexagram. Because each of the six positions can be yin or yang, the total number of possible figures is two to the sixth power — 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 64. That's where the sixty-four comes from, and it's the reason this site is called Sixty-Four. You always read a hexagram from the bottom up: the bottom line is the beginning, the ground of the situation; the top line is its culmination, or its overreach.
Anatomy of a hexagram
Read bottom to top
屯Hexagram 3 · Zhun · Difficulty at the Beginning
broken = yin
If you'd like to simply look at all sixty-four figures and their names before going further, you can browse the full lexicon of hexagrams and get a feel for the vocabulary.
How to cast a hexagram: the three-coin method
There are two traditional ways to generate a hexagram: the older, slower yarrow-stalk method, and the faster three-coin method. Almost everyone today starts with the coins, so that's what I'll walk you through. You need three coins of the same kind — any coins will do. First, decide what each side is worth: heads = 3 (a yang value), tails = 2 (a yin value). It doesn't matter which face you call heads, only that you decide before you start and stay consistent.
Now hold your question in mind, cup the three coins in your hands, and toss them. Add up the three numbers — the total lands between 6 and 9, and each total draws one line:
Reading your three coins
Heads = 3 (light coin) · Tails = 2 (dark coin). The totals marked in red are changing lines — hold that thought for section 05.
Write down that first line at the bottom. Then toss the coins five more times, stacking each new line on top of the last, until you have six lines. That stack is your hexagram. Notice the two "changing" totals, 6 and 9 — those are moving lines, and they're where the reading gets interesting. First, though, let's read the figure you've built.
The yarrow-stalk method, briefly
The older method uses fifty dried yarrow stalks and a counting ritual that takes fifteen or twenty minutes per reading. It produces the same four line-values, just with different probabilities — moving lines come up a little less often, which some readers feel makes each one weigh more. It's beautiful and meditative, and completely optional. If you're just learning how to read the I Ching, the coins are more than enough.
Reading what you got: Judgment, Image, and lines
Once you have your six lines, you look the hexagram up. Each of the sixty-four has, at minimum, three things worth reading:
- The Judgment (卦辞) — a short, often cryptic oracle-text for the whole figure. This is the headline: the overall verdict on your situation.
- The Image (大象) — a line describing the two three-line trigrams that make up the hexagram (mountain over water, wind over fire, and so on) and what the "superior person" does in response. This is the advice: how to hold yourself in the situation.
- The line texts (爻辞) — a separate short text for each of the six lines, which you read only for your moving lines.
If you go looking for a print translation, the one most English readers meet first is Richard Wilhelm's, carried into English by Cary F. Baynes — the Princeton/Bollingen edition. Its language is old-fashioned, almost Biblical, and it treats the book as philosophy rather than parlor trick, which is why it has lasted. I still reach for it. But I read it in the spirit this site is built on: the 义理 (yìlǐ) tradition — the "meaning and principle" school that treats a hexagram as a description of the situation you're in, not a prediction of your fate. That's the choice behind how Sixty-Four reads the hexagrams: each hexagram page sets the classical text — Judgment, Image, line readings — beside a clear, modern, plain-English interpretation, so you're never left alone with a three-thousand-year-old riddle.
Read the Judgment first and don't panic if it seems opaque. The I Ching almost never answers the literal question you asked. It answers the situation around the question. Give it room. Read it as though a very old, very calm friend were describing your circumstances back to you in metaphor, and ask yourself where the metaphor lands.
Moving lines and the second hexagram
This is the piece beginners most often miss, and it's the most rewarding part of learning how to read the I Ching.
Remember the totals of 6 and 9 — the changing lines. If any of your six lines is a 6 or a 9, two things happen. First, you read the individual line text for each of those positions; those texts speak to exactly where your situation is in motion. Second — and this is the elegant part — every moving line flips into its opposite: a moving yin (6) becomes yang, a moving yang (9) becomes yin. Flipping them gives you a second hexagram, called the relating hexagram (之卦).
So a reading with moving lines tells a small story in two frames:
- The first hexagram is where you are now — the present situation.
- The moving lines are the pressure points, the places actively changing.
- The relating hexagram is where things are tending — the direction the situation is unfolding toward if the current forces play out.
If you cast six stable lines and no moving ones, there's no second hexagram — the reading is simply that one figure, steady, no immediate change. That's a real answer too.
The first reading I ever did came out as Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning — a hexagram about the hard, tangled first push of something new, a sprout struggling up through frozen ground. I laughed out loud when I read it, because that was precisely, unbearably where I was. It didn't tell me what to do. It told me that the difficulty was the beginning of something, not the end of it, and that turned out to be exactly what I needed to hear. On the other end of the spectrum, the very first figure, Hexagram 1, The Creative, is six unbroken yang lines — pure initiating force — and reading the two side by side taught me more about the book's whole logic than any explanation could.
How to ask a good question
The quality of a reading depends almost entirely on the quality of the question, so let me save you the mistakes I made.
Don't ask yes/no questions. "Should I take the job?" collapses a rich situation into a coin flip and wastes what the book is good at. Ask open questions instead: "What do I need to understand about this job offer?" or "What is the nature of this situation with X?" You want the oracle to describe a landscape, not press a button.
Ask once. If you don't like the answer and immediately re-throw, you're no longer consulting — you're negotiating. Sit with the first reading. If it genuinely makes no sense after real reflection, you can return to it another day, but resist the slot-machine reflex.
Ask sincerely. This is not superstition; it's attention. A question you actually care about, held clearly while you toss the coins, produces a reading you'll engage with honestly. A test question — "what am I holding in my hand?" — produces noise, because you brought no real attention to it.
The book, in my experience, gives back exactly the seriousness you bring.
That's the whole method: understand yin and yang, cast six lines from the bottom up, read the Judgment and Image for the figure and the line texts for anything moving, and let the relating hexagram show you the direction of change. Everything else is practice — and the practice is the good part. You get better at reading the I Ching the way you get better at reading a friend: slowly, by paying attention over time.
I still don't know what I believe about it. But I know that the ten minutes I spend with three coins and a hard question are ten minutes I spend being honest with myself, and there are worse things to build a habit around than that.