About ZenHexa

The I Ching (Book of Changes) is among the oldest surviving books in the world. This site presents it as what it is — a philosophical tradition about reading the shape of a moment.

The lineage

Tradition attributes the eight trigrams to Fu Xi, the sixty-four hexagrams and their judgments to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou, and the Ten Wings commentary to Confucius and his school. Whatever one makes of the attributions, the text as received is the product of roughly a millennium of use.

Our approach

A reading here is built from four things: the primary hexagram and its classical judgment and image; the position of any moving line; the hexagram that results when those lines change; and the relationship between the hexagram's element and the element of the question you asked. Each is shown to you, so you can see how the reading was reached.

Why it travelled west

Richard Wilhelm's German translation, and Cary Baynes' English version of it, carried the I Ching into European and American intellectual life. Carl Jung wrote his essay on synchronicity as a preface to that edition. The book has been read in the West less as a fortune-telling device than as a study of how situations change.

On language

We deliberately avoid the vocabulary of prediction. The classical text is interested in what a situation is becoming, not in announcing a fixed result. That is also, incidentally, what makes it useful.