The I-Ching as it was actually written — classical texts, 64 hexagrams, the 4,096 Yilin verses. No subscription. https://xitter.gq/t.co/ixVZ5ZBd58
Somewhere between 子午线 & Binary
Joined July 2024
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SIX LINES I-CHING retweeted
Happy Mid Autumn Festival everyone!
Contemplation, Hexagram 20 means 'to look'. My favorite line is line 4, which says to observe with the courtesy of a visitor, rather than with the authority of an inspector.
Made with Opus 5.5 and a bunch of custom assets and Blender.
@sixlinesapp
SIX LINES I-CHING retweeted
Around 50 BCE a Han scholar, Jiao Gan, sat down and wrote a verse for every possible move the I-Ching can make.
Any of the 64 hexagrams can change into any of the 64, itself included. That's 64 × 64 = 4,096 transitions, and the Yilin (易林, "Forest of Changes") fills in all of them. One short poem per cell. Zero empty cells.
It's keyed like a table: open Qian and 64 entries wait below it, one for each destination. The canon names the 64 places; the Forest writes every road between them.
And the verses don't instruct, they evoke. A flock running south. A cracked wheel on a stalled cart. A plum tree breaking into bloom after frost. The link to the transition is rarely literal, so you hold the image against your situation until something lands.
The lookup returns a candidate. You finish the read.
> 易林: 4096 cells · 0 empty
SIX LINES I-CHING retweeted
Today's I-Ching hexagram wasn't cast by anyone. It was scheduled — and the schedule is two thousand years old.
In the first century BCE, two scholars, Meng Xi and his student Jing Fang, looked at the newly standardized solar calendar and saw addressable space. They shipped 卦氣六日七分: "hexagram qi, six days and seven parts," assigning every hexagram in the book to a fixed window of the year.
The arithmetic is the tell. Four hexagrams get pulled out to anchor the solstices and equinoxes; their 24 lines map one-to-one onto the 24 solar terms. That leaves 60 to cover the rest. 365.25 ÷ 60 = 6.0875 days each: six days plus exactly 7/80 of a day. The remainders accumulate back into whole days, so the cycle closes with no gaps and no collisions.
It doesn't even start on Hexagram 1. The cycle opens at the winter solstice on 中孚 (Inner Truth, Hexagram 61) and runs the classical sequence from there.
So the hexagram of the day isn't a coin toss tied to when you open the app. It's deterministic, computed from the winter solstice, and it's been running without drift for two millennia.
> CRON 卦氣六日七分 · epoch: winter solstice · drift: none
SIX LINES I-CHING retweeted
Every I-Ching hexagram contains its own future. Some lines are stable. Some are about to flip — and when they do, they generate a second hexagram. Your reading just grew a second chapter from within the original cast.
You didn't draw another card. The pattern you threw contained a transformation already written into it. In Chinese cosmology this is foundational: everything that reaches its extreme reverses. The hottest point of summer contains the first seed of winter.
In tarot, narrative comes from the layout of the spread (the reader imposes structure). In the I-Ching, the narrative emerges from the hexagram itself. The oracle volunteered it.
I think that's the moment most people get hooked — when they realize the reading is moving on its own.
#IChing #divination
SIX LINES I-CHING retweeted
The entire I-Ching is built from an alphabet of eight characters. Eight trigrams — that's all the raw material you need.
Every hexagram is a word spelled with two of these letters. Each hexagram has six lines, each line can change, producing 4,096 possible transformations. But you don't learn 4,096 things. You learn eight, and the rest follows.
Fire clings to what it burns. It needs fuel to exist. Clinging to what fuels you is both fire's nature and its limitation. Wind finds every crack — influence that works slowly but reaches everywhere (Xun, the gentlest trigram).
Reverse the positions of any two trigrams and the reading changes completely. Same characters, opposite meaning. That's the architecture.
#IChing #divination
SIX LINES I-CHING retweeted
The I-Ching doesn't revolve around you. It shows you the conditions of heaven and earth that you happen to be standing in. It describes the weather, not the traveller.
Most tarot readers bounce off it within a session. The text reads like a fortune cookie written by a Confucian bureaucrat — no image surfaces, no narrative unfolds, no intuition fires. That's because they're reading it like a spread. The I-Ching isn't a mirror (it doesn't reflect your interior). It's a landscape report.
Underneath the Confucian commentary, the original vocabulary is closer to poetry. Dragons rising from the deep. Thunder beneath the earth. Wind over the lake. Ice forming under your feet. A well whose water is clear but that no one drinks from.
#IChing #tarot
SIX LINES I-CHING retweeted
@UChicagoAHD's Edward Shaughnessy wrote his thesis in 1983 titled "The Composition of the Zhouyi." It was never commercially published, but it quietly shaped every serious Western study of the I-Ching since.
Buried in endnote 82, he hid his most speculative idea. A thread 🧵
SIX LINES I-CHING retweeted
Scruton's introduction to his 2009 BBC documentary Why Beauty Matters vimeo.com/128428182.
"At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you asked educated people to describe the aim of poetry, art or music, they would have replied 'beauty'. And, if you had asked for the point of that, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important as truth and goodness.
Then, in the 20th century, beauty stopped being important. Art increasingly aimed to disturb and to break moral taboos. It was not beauty, but originality, however achieved, and at whatever moral cost, that won the prizes.
Not only has art made a cult of ugliness. Architecture too has become soulless and sterile. And it is not just our physical surroundings that have become ugly. Our language, our music, and our manners are increasingly raucous, self-centred, and offensive, as though beauty and good taste have no real place in our lives. One word is written large on all these ugly things, and that word is 'me': my profits, my desires, my pleasures. And art has nothing to say in response to this, except 'Yeah, go for it!'
I think we are losing beauty, and there is a danger that with it we will lose the meaning of life."
