Hold a question. Cast the coins six times.
Let the moment answer.
The oldest of the Chinese classics reads the present as a pattern of six lines — solid and broken, still and changing — and shows you the shape the moment is turning into.
Two trigrams stacked make a hexagram; sixty-four in all, ordered as King Wen arranged them three thousand years ago. Touch any figure to read its judgment.
Every hexagram is a pair of these: an image below and an image above. Heaven and Earth, Water and Fire, Thunder and Wind, Mountain and Lake — the eight forces from which the sixty-four are drawn.
For each line, three bronze coins are tossed. Heads count three, tails two; their sum — six, seven, eight, or nine — becomes one line of the hexagram, built from the bottom upward.
Odd sums are yang (solid), even are yin (broken). A six or a nine is an old line, already straining toward its opposite — these are the changing lines. Seven and eight are young and still.
The hexagram you cast is the present. Flip every changing line and a second hexagram appears — the situation to come. The oracle speaks not of fate but of movement: what is, and what it is becoming.