About I Ching Explained

Why this site exists

The I Ching has been online since the 1990s, and almost every version of it is one of two things: a beautiful old text you cannot read, or a clunky old tool you do not want to use. The translations that shaped Western understanding of the book — Legge's, Wilhelm's — are nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship written in a register nobody speaks any more. Meanwhile the tools that exist feel like the internet of 2005, and many of them quietly fake the odds.

So we are doing the unglamorous version: a casting tool that is honest about its probabilities, and a complete reading of all 64 hexagrams written in plain modern English that you can actually finish. No "ancient masters", no countdown timers, no selling you a personal reading from someone you cannot verify.

How we write the readings

Every hexagram page carries the same structure: the situation, the traditional image, what it means in love and work, how to treat it when there is a decision on the table, and each of the six changing lines. We describe the structural relationships between hexagrams — nuclear, complementary, inverse, one-line neighbours — because those are facts about the system and they are the fastest way to understand why a reading points where it does.

The text is written for people who want to use the book, not for people who want to belong to something. If a passage sounds like it could mean anything, we cut it.

Honesty about what this is

We are not a translation and we do not claim to be the tradition. We are a modern reading, and where the tradition disagrees with itself we say so. The I Ching works for a lot of people as a structured way to think about a hard decision. That is the claim we are prepared to defend — nothing more mystical than that.

How the site is paid for

Display advertising and, on a couple of pages, affiliate links to books and coin sets. That is it. There is no account to create, nothing to subscribe to, and your journal stays in your own browser.

Corrections

Found an error, a broken relation, a line we got wrong? This site is a work in progress and we would rather be corrected than quoted. Write to hello@mybagua.cc.