How to consult
Before the book there is a gesture, and the gesture begins with the one who makes it. The Great Plan, an ancient chapter of the Book of Documents, tells the king in doubt over a great matter to consult first his own heart, then his ministers, then the people, and only then the tortoise and the stalks: the oracle was one voice among others, and the last to speak. Whoever consults the Changes walks the same road in small: thinks, weighs, and when thought is no longer enough asks the question and lets chance choose a figure.
The book itself describes a count, not a throw. The Great Treatise speaks of fifty stalks of yarrow: one is set aside, the remaining forty-nine are divided into two heaps, one stalk is hung between the fingers and the others are counted off four at a time — the two heaps for the two forces, the hanging stalk to make three, the four of the seasons. Three such passes make a line; eighteen, says the Treatise, make a hexagram. Zhu Xi reconstructed the procedure step by step in the twelfth century, and his is the one still followed.
Of coins the Treatise says nothing. They are the short way: three coins thrown together, and a number for each face — here three for heads, two for tails. The sum comes to six, seven, eight or nine, and that sum is the line: seven and eight the still lines, yang and yin; nine and six the lines that change. Six throws, one line per throw, and the figure is whole.
It is not the same count. With the coins, seven and eight each come up three times in eight, six and nine once: the two changing lines weigh the same. With the stalks the weights differ, and the changing yang comes up about three times as often as the changing yin. Whoever counts with coins thus hears the oracle change a little less from yang and a little more from yin — and this house counts with coins, and says so.
The lines settle from the bottom. The first is the lowest and the figure grows upward, one line per throw, until the sixth closes it: the hexagram is born like a building, from the foundations, and that is why the first line is said to be at the beginning and the sixth at the top. Here the rite goes like this: you throw three real coins and for each coin you tap the side that came up; the page adds, settles the line and waits for the next. The chance is yours; the page counts.
Of the oldest consultations we know — the two dozen recorded in the Zuozhuan, between 672 and 485 BC — none explains the method: the diviners count and do not say how. They do say what came out, and they say it with a formula: the figure, and then the figure into which one of its lines transforms it — Guan’s Pi, to name the line of Guan that distinguishes it from Pi. Naming a line by the figure it goes towards: the formula pointed to a single line, and only later was it read as the passage from one figure to another. But the seed of the transformation lies there, in the oldest readings we have.
Then one reads. First the name and the Judgement, the sentence that weighs the whole figure; then the Image, which tells the two natures and how one stands within them. If no line changes the reading ends here: the situation is still and the book speaks with the figure alone. If one line changes, its text is the most precise voice of the answer: it says where you are, in that place and at that moment. The Treatise says that the noble one, when about to act, asks the book and the answer comes back to him like an echo; and that the book serves to give firmness to undertakings and to settle doubts.
When more than one line changes, tradition has rules about which to weigh, and Zhu Xi devoted a chapter to how one passes to the second figure. The rule of this house is simple and declared: with two moving lines the higher one governs, because it has already crossed the situation; from three to five no single line governs, and the weight passes to the Judgement of the figure of arrival; with six only the figure of arrival is read — and for the Creative and the Receptive the book has one text more, written for that case alone.
The figure of arrival is the second word of the answer. From Zhu Xi onward it is read as the direction of the movement: not what will happen, but where what is leans, if the moving lines run their course. So reads this house too: the first figure tells the situation, the lines the point at which it moves, the second the landing — and the reading is the arc between the two, with departure and arrival weighing the same.
And one consults once. The Judgement of the fourth hexagram, Youthful Folly, has said it since the oldest layer of the book: «At the first oracle I answer; who asks again importunes — and receives no answer». It is not a prohibition, it is counsel: the second question about the same thing does not ask the book, it asks one’s own wish for a different answer. Here, therefore, a coin tapped wrongly is corrected, until the next line settles; but a settled line is not reconsidered — the slip of transcription is mended, the second thought is not. Until the sixth line settles you can still start over from the beginning, because no answer has been given; once the figure is born, that question is spent and the rite does not reopen for it. The question has its throw and the throw its figure; the figure is read, and kept.