Not a telescope but a mirror: it shows the shape of the moment you're standing in, not the future. Ask one honest thing.
數Today's hexagram
Plum Blossom · number cast
需
waiting · patience
Your hexagram is 需 — not an answer but an image; sit with what it reflects right now.
This one isn't drawn — it's counted. Today's date and you become two numbers, and the numbers become a hexagram. It stays the same all day, however often you open this page. A different school from the cast below: it is given, not asked for.
Zhou Yi · yarrow stalks, three changes
The old way: 49 stalks, divided three times for one line, eighteen times for six. The four outcomes are not equally likely — of every 16 lines, 1 old yin · 5 young yang · 7 young yin · 3 old yang. Yang moves easily, yin tends to stay; that asymmetry is the teaching, and coins flatten it away.
Two hexagrams from two different schools, side by side: today's Plum Blossom hexagram (given, not asked for) and a yarrow-stalk hexagram for the one thing you ask.
Today's hexagram comes from Plum Blossom number-casting — the date and a per-person seed become two numbers, deterministically turned into a hexagram with exactly one moving line, no randomness. Asking a question casts by the traditional three-change yarrow-stalk method (49 stalks, divided three times per line) — its four outcomes aren't equal (of every 16 lines: 1 old yin, 5 young yang, 7 young yin, 3 old yang), so between 0 and 6 lines move. How many lines move decides which passage to read, by Zhu Xi's Yixue Qimeng rule (考變占).
We don't invent scripture: every passage shown — all 64 Judgments, the 384 line texts, and 用九 · 用六 — is the received text (通行本) checked character by character, with Zhu Xi's punctuation where editions split; the English beneath it is our own rendering, not a quotation. One reading rule (the 前十卦/後十卦 split for 3 moving lines) isn't reproducible without its source table, so we don't use it — we say so rather than guess. Asking the same question twice doesn't draw again, honoring 蒙卦's warning against muddying a reading by repeating it. This is a mirror for reflection, never medical, legal, or financial advice.
Why do today's hexagram and my question use different methods?
They're two different schools shown side by side. Today's hexagram is Plum Blossom number-casting — deterministic, given whether or not you ask. Your question casts by the yarrow-stalk method — probabilistic, with a lopsided 1/16·5/16·7/16·3/16 spread across its four outcomes, and only exists because you asked.
Why does asking the same question again give the same hexagram?
We don't draw again — we return your first answer. That follows Hexagram 4 (蒙)'s own warning: the first asking is answered, but asking two or three times muddies it, and a muddied asking gets no answer.
Where does the classical text come from, and why is the translation sometimes in English?
All 64 hexagrams are in: 64 Judgments, 384 line texts, and the two special texts 用九 and 用六, each checked character by character against the received text (通行本). Where editions punctuate a line differently we follow Zhu Xi's Zhouyi Benyi, because the rule that picks which line to read is his too. The English and Korean renderings beneath each passage are our own; in other languages the page shows the English rendering for now and says so.
What the coins actually flatten
The cast above prints its own odds and then adds that tossed coins flatten that asymmetry away. It does not say what gets flattened, and the honest answer is narrower than it sounds. Both procedures are short enough to walk to the end rather than sample: the three-change stalk method has exactly 64 paths through it per line, starting from 49 stalks; the three-coin method has 8; and the six lines of a hexagram make 4,096 outcome patterns between them. Everything below is a count over those, never a simulation.
Both columns are walked in full — 64 stalk paths and 8 coin faces crossed over the six lines of a hexagram. The top four rows are the odds the page already prints; the rest follow from them.
What is being counted
Yarrow stalks
Three coins
Old yin ⚋ (6) — a yin line that is moving
1 in 16
1 in 8
Young yang ⚊ (7) — a yang line that stays
5 in 16
3 in 8
Young yin ⚋ (8) — a yin line that stays
7 in 16
3 in 8
Old yang ⚊ (9) — a yang line that is moving
3 in 16
1 in 8
A line of the primary figure comes out yang
50.00%
50.00%
A line is moving
25.00%
25.00%
Moving lines in a cast, on average
1.50
1.50
Casts in which nothing moves at all
17.80%
17.80%
Each of the 64 figures, as the primary figure
1.56%
1.56%
A yang line moves, against a yin line
3 to 1
1 to 1
A line of the resulting figure comes out yang
37.50%
50.00%
坤 — all six lines yin — as the resulting figure
15,625 in 262,144 (5.96%)
1 in 64 (1.56%)
乾 — all six lines yang — as the resulting figure
729 in 262,144 (0.28%)
1 in 64 (1.56%)
Commonest resulting figure, against the rarest
21.43 to 1
1 to 1
Moving lines expected after a cast of 乾
2.25
1.50
Moving lines expected after a cast of 坤
0.75
1.50
Start with what does not move. A line comes out yang exactly half the time under either method — 50.00% with the stalks, 50.00% with the coins — and the six lines are settled one after another, none of them consulting the others. All 64 figures are therefore equally likely either way, 1.56% apiece. The figure you are handed is not the thing the coins flatten.
Neither is the amount of movement, which is the part most people assume changes. A stalk line moves when it lands on old yin or old yang, and so does a coin line; the two rarest stalk outcomes add up to the same quarter as the two rarest coin outcomes. Everything downstream of that quarter is identical: 1.50 moving lines in an average cast under both, and 17.80% of casts — 729 in 4,096 of them — with nothing moving at all. Switching to coins to get livelier readings would change nothing whatsoever.
What differs is not either count on its own but the way the two are tied together. With the stalks, a yang line moves 37.50% of the time and a yin line 12.50%, the three-to-one the page above calls the teaching; with the coins both are 25.00%. Two methods can agree on how often a line is yang, and agree on how often a line moves, and still disagree completely about which lines those are.
That disagreement has to surface somewhere, and it surfaces on the resulting figure — the second hexagram, the one the cast is turning into. Old yang is the commoner of the two moving outcomes, so more lines turn from yang to yin than the other way, and a line of the resulting figure comes out yang only 37.50% of the time instead of half. All 64 figures remain reachable, but not evenly: 坤 arrives as the resulting figure 15,625 in 262,144 (5.96%) of the time against 729 in 262,144 (0.28%) for 乾, a spread of 21.43 to one between the commonest and the rarest. With coins the resulting figure is as flat as the primary, 1 in 64 (1.56%) apiece.
There is a second consequence, and it is the stranger of the two: with the stalks, the figure you are handed tells you something about how much of it will move. Expected moving lines run 0.75 after a cast of 坤 and 2.25 after 乾, climbing by 0.25 for each yang line in the figure; with coins it is 1.50 whatever you were handed. Zhu Xi's rule picks which passage to read from the number of moving lines, so which branch of that rule you land in is not independent of the figure you cast — under the stalks, and only under the stalks.
None of this is a claim about what the classical texts say. It is the arithmetic of two procedures walked to the end, and it settles one question only: which of the things you might have thought the coins change, they actually change. They leave the figure alone, they leave the amount of movement alone, and they flatten the direction the movement takes. Whether that direction ought to be flattened is a question for the schools; the question cast on this page uses the stalks, and the page now says what that choice does.