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Method, translations and sources
What this site relies on, where the texts come from, and why an electronic casting here is as honest as a yarrow sorting.
Why the randomness here is real
Tradition never required physical objects. It required something else: that the outcome be inaccessible to the intention of the one asking. Yarrow served not because it is a plant, but because a person sorting fifty stalks cannot predict how many will fall in each handful.
The coins on this site are thrown by crypto.getRandomValues, the
browser’s cryptographic random number generator. It derives nothing from
the time, the question or anything else connected to you; it is the same source
of entropy that secures encrypted connections.
Coins and yarrow: the difference
| Number | Line | Yarrow | Coins |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | old yin | 1/16 | 1/8 |
| 7 | young yang | 5/16 | 3/8 |
| 8 | young yin | 7/16 | 3/8 |
| 9 | old yang | 3/16 | 1/8 |
With stalks, old yang appears three times as often as old yin — light passes into its opposite less readily than darkness does. Coins level those odds. The argument over which is «correct» is centuries old; both are recognised by tradition and both are still in use.
What the Book of Changes is
The Zhou Yi is the oldest of the Chinese canonical books, formed roughly in the first millennium BCE. It consists of 64 hexagrams, brief judgements for each, and aphorisms for each of the six lines — 386 texts in all, since the first two hexagrams have an additional line.
The book is layered: first came the mantic formulas used in divination, then the line texts, then the philosophical commentaries — the «ten wings», among them the Image (象曰), given here for every hexagram. Centuries separate the layers.
Translations
The English texts on this site follow the scholarly translation of James Legge (1882), which is in the public domain.
In Europe the best-known version is Richard Wilhelm’s German translation (1924); the English edition by Cary Baynes with a foreword by C. G. Jung (1950) made the book famous in the West.
In Russian the classic work remains the study by Iulian Shchutsky (1897–1938), a 1937 dissertation published posthumously in 1960. The Russian version of this site follows it.