Is a reading on a screen a real I Ching reading?

How it was done for 3,000 years

The I Ching — the Chinese Book of Changes — answers you with a figure of six lines. Every line is thrown, one at a time, and the throw has never had one fixed tool. It has had several, and the tool changed on purpose.

1. c. 1000 BC

   Yarrow stalks

   Fifty dried stalks. One is set aside and never used. The other forty-nine are split by hand and counted off in fours, three times over — and that produces one line. Six lines, about twenty minutes, in silence.

2. c. 1000 AD

   Three coins

   A thousand years later, three coins replaced the stalks because they take three minutes instead of twenty. The odds are not identical to the stalks, and the tradition adopted them anyway. Everyone understood that what is handed down is the chance, not the plant.

3. Today

   Six clicks — or your own coins

   One click is one throw of three coins, with those exact odds. If you would rather not have a machine anywhere near the throw, throw on your table and type the six numbers in. Both roads end at the same book.

The stalks and the coins do not even give the same odds as each other. Both are traditional anyway.

That is the part worth sitting with. When the coins arrived, nobody argued that a thrown coin was less sacred than a dried plant. The question was only whether the chance was honest and the count was right. We are asking to be judged by exactly that standard — and below, we show our numbers so you can.

What six clicks actually do

One click is one throw of three coins. Heads counts as 3, tails as 2, so three coins always add up to 6, 7, 8, or 9. That single number is one line.

7 and 9 are solid lines, 6 and 8 are broken ones. The two outer numbers — 6 and 9 — are changing lines: they flip, and the flip gives you a second figure.

“But a computer is involved”

It rolls and it writes down. It does not choose.

• The numbers come from crypto.getRandomValues in your own browser — the same randomness that protects a bank login. Not our server, not a stored list of “popular” hexagrams, and not the AI.
• Nothing is weighted. Hexagram 1 and hexagram 47 are equally likely, and no reading is nudged toward a dramatic figure or a sales pitch.
• Your six numbers, the method and the time are written down and hashed before any interpretation is requested. Every reading shows you that receipt.

And here is what that hash cannot do: prove our generator is honest. No hash on any website can prove that, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.

Who actually answers you

The book does. In four separate layers, and you can stop after any of them.

Every reading and every hexagram page is stacked in the same order, and each layer is labelled so you always know whose sentence you are reading:

1. The book, untouched

   元亨利貞，无咎。

   Classical Chinese

2. The book in English

   Following indicates successful progress and no error through firm correctness.

   James Legge, 1882 — public domain

3. Ours, and labelled

   As you connect with steadier influences, the smaller attachments fall away on their own.

   I Ching Today, on the changing line

4. Optional

   You asked about the offer. This figure is about who you follow, not about the money in it.

   Master Wu — you can ignore this entirely

The first two layers are the oracle. They are free, they need no account, and they are identical for everyone who throws that figure — that is the whole point of consulting a book instead of a person. The third is ours and says so. The fourth is the AI, and it is extra reading you can skip without losing the answer.

Can an AI read the I Ching?

No — and it is never asked to.

Master Wu, our reader, is called after your figure already exists. He has three rules and they are not negotiable:

• He never throws. The six numbers are fixed, recorded and hashed before he is called.
• He never divines. He is not asked what will happen to you. He is asked what these particular lines say, given the question you typed.
• He never replaces the book. The Chinese and the 1882 English sit above him on the page, so you can check him in one glance.

1. 1Your handSix clicks, or three coins on your own table.
2. 2The figureSix numbers, written down and hashed. Now fixed.
3. 3The bookThe Chinese original, then Legge’s 1882 English.
4. 4Master WuOptional commentary in today’s words.
5. 5YouDecide. Nobody else can, and nobody here pretends to.

Master Wu enters at step 4. He cannot reach back to step 2.

So why have him at all? Because the text is old and tightly packed. “The wild goose gradually approaches the shore” is a real line, and most people need a minute with it. He is that minute — a footnote, not an oracle.

Where he can be wrong is your life, which he does not know. When his sentence and the line’s own words disagree, the line wins. Ignoring him costs you nothing: the reading above him is complete on its own.

Nothing changed in my reading. Is it broken?

No. That is an answer, and a common one — about one reading in six.

Coins or yarrow: the numbers, in full

Nothing here is hidden, so you can compare us against any book or any other site:

Coins take about three minutes, stalks about twenty. With stalks, changing yang (9) turns up three times as often as changing yin (6) — that lopsidedness is the tradition, not a defect. Either way a line changes one time in four, so a reading averages 1.5 changing lines. Our yarrow option maps four random bits onto the traditional 16-count, with no discarded samples.

The shortcut we refuse to use

There is an easier way to draw a line: flip one coin, heads yang, tails yin. It sounds harmless. It makes every line change half the time. Look at what that does to a reading:

Three lines changing on average instead of 1.5. A still figure once in 64 readings instead of once in six. Same 64 names on the box, different oracle inside.

We are not pointing at anyone else. This site drew lines that way for years. We fixed it, and now every reading carries a receipt naming the method that produced it.

Throw it yourself

No account, no permission, nothing to install. Two traditional methods, both accepted for centuries:

Three coins about 3 minutes

1. Use three similar coins. Decide which face is heads (3) and which is tails (2).
2. Hold the question, then throw all three together.
3. Add the faces: three tails is 6, two tails is 7, two heads is 8, three heads is 9.
4. Write that number as the bottom line. Repeat five more times, stacking upward.
5. 6 and 9 are changing lines. 7 (young yang) and 8 (young yin) stay still.

Always start from the bottom line. Entering the stack upside down gives a different hexagram.

Yarrow stalks about 20 minutes

1. Begin with fifty stalks. Set one aside and do not use it again. Work with the remaining forty-nine.
2. For each line you divide the remaining stalks into two piles at random, take one stalk from the right-hand pile, then count each pile off by fours. The remainders (one to four) are set aside with the single stalk.
3. Repeat that division twice more with whatever stalks are left. After three divisions the leftover count is 24, 28, 32, or 36.
4. Divide that leftover by four. You get 6, 7, 8, or 9 for the line. Write it, then start again from forty-nine stalks for the next line.
5. Do this six times, bottom line first.

Yarrow odds are not the same as coins. Old yang (9) appears more often than old yin (6), so yang lines change more often than yin. That is the traditional method, not a defect.

Then open the homepage, choose I already cast it, and type your six numbers in. The book text is free either way.

Where the words come from

• The Chinese is the received Zhou Yi text — the original book — shown above the English on every hexagram page and in every reading.
• The judgments are James Legge’s 1882 translation. Public domain, unedited by us.
• The changing-line notes are written here, in plain English, from those same lines. They are labelled as ours, never as the book.
• Wilhelm and Baynes is not here. That translation is still under copyright. A site handing it out for free either licensed it or took it.

The free reading gives you all three of the first layers. Master Wu’s longer personal interpretation is the paid part — and the reading does not depend on it.

Straight answers to the usual doubts