I Ching/Yi Jing

Old Fogey's Guide to the Book of Change

This is version o.23 (August 1995)

version 2.6a

version 2.5

More About I Ching/Yi Jing

"Of all the records of the soul the I Ching/Yi Jing is among the most ancient and most holy."
It is also one of the earliest surviving examples of a hypertext document.

At its most basic level the I Ching/Yi Jing is a collection of sixty-four figures each of which is comprised of of six lines. Each line is either broken or unbroken, open or closed, off or on. Each six lined figure, called a hexagram, represents a particular situation. Over the years several basic texts and innumerable commentaries have been associated with each hexagram in order to describe the situation it represents.

Consult the classic of change/the changing classic

On-line

There are at least two web pages from which it is possible to use a
Sun workstation to cast a hexagram in order to investigate the texture
and structure of the present moment and seek some clue about the
prevailing and emerging situations.

One page is at UCLA.

Another page is available from the folks at Enternet Communications.

At one time an I Ching program was included as part of the Sun operating system.

Disk of Change/I Ching/YiJing programs for the home computer

If you would like to consult the I Ching/Yi Jing without being online
Talis has an I Ching program for Windows. Several Macintosh HyperCard
versions of the I Ching/Yi Jing are available. Several versions are
also available for MS-DOS computers. Consult the bibliography for
further details.

Traditional methods

There are other methods of casting a hexagram which require less
machinery. These include the three coin method and the yarrow stalk
method.

Introductory material and commentaries

A brief history of the development of the I Ching/Yi Jing is available from Talis.

Rick Le Mon's I Ching page includes some introductory information
about trigrams and an English translation of the basic text.

An article by Terrence Payne which describes the structure and
relationships of the hexagrams is available from his page Tao of I Ching.

A brief introduction to the I Ching/Yi Jing by Paul Williams appeared
in Crawdaddy! magazine in 1973.

Bibliography.

The Ten Wings and other commentaries

Beyond the basic text the earliest layer of commentaries is known as
the Ten Wings. This material was compiled by the ealy Confucians.
Check back again later for more details.

Thanks

Thanks for visiting this web page. Hopefully it will be updated
frequently, so stop back again sometime soon.

This page is maintained by [old fogey] for milfoil communications
and was last updated August 7, 1995.

Thanks to Global Information Analysis Networking Technologies for
providing Silicone Prairie as a public web server.

Thanks to Panda and the Information Arcade at the University of Iowa
Library. Without these two projects it would not be possible to make
this presentation.

"I don't believe in I Ching."--John Lennon

"You don't have to believe in it for it to work."--Chester Anderson