Chinese Psychic

I CHING (YI CHING)

The Classic of changes, more commonly known as the I Ching, is one of the Five Classics of Chinese Psychic that has its roots back to ancient China. It is one of the fundamental books of Confucianism, with an age of more than 3000 years old. The symbols of divination that are recorded in the book are over 5000 years old. Thus, making it one of the oldest surviving book in the world and also the oldest form of divination. Asians have been dependant on it as a spiritual resource and oracle. Recent times have seen the West reading and using it too. This might be due to the fact that the I Ching has an uncanny ability to give detailed insights to those we study it diligently.

Practicing the I Ching would involve casting coins or yarrow stalks, so as to construct a hexagram (with six lines), these lines would either represent Yin (the feminine force) or Yang (the masculine force). These resulting lines would then be looked up in the I Ching, which would then be interpreted with a passage describing what each line means.

In the I Ching, there are at least 64 possible hexagrams. And that's not all, each of these hexagrams can be further broken down into groups of 3 lines(trigrams). The most amazing thing in I Ching is that each of these six lines, may be indicating that it is about to change from Yin to Yang or Yang to Yin. But did you know that by inverting each of these changing lines, we can also generate another hexagram which would depict our immediate future.

The I Ching was written in Chinese for ancient China. So how is it possible that the West would be able to make use of it? Never fear. A popular and commonly used English translation of the I Ching (or Yi Ching) was by Cary Baynes, written in 1951. It was translated from a German translation by Richard Wilhelm in 1923, it is very poetic and beautiful to read, the text has been influenced by Wilhelm's addition of Christian values into the Confucian text. To avoid these problems, there is another version of the I Ching. It is based on the oldest scholarly English translation written by James Legge in 1882 . This translation has kept close context to the main Chinese text.

HOW IT WORKS.

1. Lines are numbered from 1 at the bottom to 6 at the top, with the divided lines being Yin and undivided lines, Yang.
2. Black lines represents new and unchanging, while the gray lines represents old and changing.