Getting started
A first path into the Book of Changes
What the I Ching is
How to cast with coins
The simplest method uses three coins. Decide before you begin which side counts as yang (worth 3) and which as yin (worth 2). Hold your question in mind and throw all three coins together.
Add the three values. The total gives you one line, from the bottom up:
- 6 — old yin (a broken, changing line)
- 7 — young yang (a solid line)
- 8 — young yin (a broken line)
- 9 — old yang (a solid, changing line)
Throw six times to build the hexagram from the bottom line to the top. Any 6s or 9s arechanging lines — they carry the most specific guidance, and they point toward a second hexagram the situation is turning into. If casting by hand feels fiddly, theonline oracle does the throws for you.
How to read a hexagram
Start with the hexagram as a whole — its name, its image, and the judgment. Let the image land before you decide what it "means." Then read any changing lines in order; they speak to the particular edge of your question.
If there are changing lines, note the second hexagram they produce. It suggests where the present is already headed. Resist rushing to a verdict — the reading is a conversation, not a ruling.
The five-step practice
- 1
Ask
Bring a real, open question — something you actually face, phrased so an answer could change what you do.
- 2
Cast
Throw three coins six times to build a hexagram, line by line, from the bottom up. Some lines may be changing.
- 3
Interpret
Read the hexagram and any changing lines. Sit with the image before you reach for a verdict.
- 4
Commit
Translate the reading into one concrete next action — small enough to actually do this week.
- 5
Review
Return to your notes later and record what changed. The practice compounds through review.
Study with Adam Bauer
Adam Bauer has practiced the I Ching for forty-five years and taught it for twenty-five. A kirtan musician and former bassist for Krishna Das, he brings a working teacher's patience to the Book of Changes — less fortune-telling, more a way of listening.
He offers private consultations and, from time to time, small retreats. His approach is the one this site is built around: ask a real question, cast, interpret, and commit to a concrete next step.
Learn more about Adam →
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is a three-thousand-year-old Chinese text built around sixty-four hexagrams — six-line figures made of solid (yang) and broken (yin) lines. Each hexagram describes a state of things and how it tends to move.
Consulting it is not fortune-telling. You bring a genuine question, cast a hexagram, and read it as a mirror for the moment you are in — a way of listening more carefully to a situation you are already inside.