The figure of a changing moment.

Before the coin method

By the Zhou period, diviners were consulting bundles of dried yarrow stalks. The received rite begins with fifty. One is placed aside as a witness and is not used again; the remaining forty-nine are divided into two heaps.

One stalk is taken from the right-hand heap, then both heaps are counted away in groups of four. Their remainders are gathered. This operation is performed three times to make a single line, producing a value of 6, 7, 8, or 9. Six lines are formed from bottom to top. A physical consultation can take close to half an hour. Its slowness is not an inconvenience but part of the attention the rite asks for.

The Dao behind the book

The Book of Changes is older than Daoism as a school, yet the two grew from the same ground. Before anything is named there is the Dao, the way things go of themselves. From it come the two breaths, yang and yin — the firm and the yielding, light and shade, the sunny and the shaded slope of one hill. Neither is good or bad; each holds the seed of the other and turns into it at its extreme.

Lao Zi wrote that reversal is the movement of the Dao, and that the soft overcomes the hard. The I Ching shows exactly this: every line, pushed to its end, changes into its opposite. A whole line is yang, a broken line yin; three lines make a trigram, the eight trigrams combine into sixty-four hexagrams, and every hexagram is a single moment in the ceaseless turning.

To consult the book in a Daoist spirit is not to demand a verdict. It is to see which way the current runs, so that one can act without forcing — wu wei — like water finding its level, or Zhuang Zi's cook who carved an ox by following its natural seams and never dulled his blade. The sage in the Changes does not command events; he recognises the season and moves with it.

The Confucian commentaries, the Ten Wings, read the same figures as lessons in conduct for the noble one. The Veil keeps both voices: the ethical counsel of the classical text, and the Daoist sense of yielding, emptiness and return.

The eight trigrams

Each hexagram consists of two three-line figures. These eight trigrams, the bagua, name elementary powers rather than static objects: Heaven acts, Earth receives, Thunder arouses, Wind enters, Water descends, Fire clings, Mountain stills, and Lake opens into joy. The tradition gives them a family, a direction and a part of the body, so that a reading can be felt as well as understood.

The six lines

A hexagram is read from the bottom up. The first line is the beginning, still below the surface; the second is the inner centre and often favourable; the third stands at the threshold of the lower trigram and is exposed; the fourth has crossed into the outer world, close to power, like a minister; the fifth is the ruler's place, the centre of the upper trigram; the top line is the end, where a movement has gone too far or is completing itself. Each of the sixty-four hexagrams has its own six line texts — three hundred and eighty-four in all — and they speak only when a line moves.

The sixty-four hexagrams

Choose a hexagram to read its judgment, its image, its meaning in the light of the Dao, and each of its six lines.

How to read the answer

Begin with the primary hexagram as the structure of the present moment. Read its lower trigram as the inner or emerging movement and its upper trigram as the outer field in which that movement appears.

If 6 or 9 occurs, that line is moving. Attend to those positions as points of tension, ripeness, or transition. Change every moving yin line into yang and every moving yang line into yin: the new figure is the relating hexagram. It is not a guaranteed future, but the direction implicit in the change.

Ask about the movement

Ask what the present situation requires, what is changing, what must be understood before acting, or how to meet a recurring event. Avoid forcing the book into a simple yes or no. One sincere question and one complete casting are enough.

The digital yarrow rite

The Veil preserves the received yarrow probabilities — 6 appears once in sixteen outcomes, 7 five times, 8 seven times, and 9 three times — and shows the witness, divisions, and three changes that form each line. It is a contemplative reconstruction of the structure, not a claim that a screen replaces the material, half-hour rite.