Anything can become a hexagram.
A moment. Two numbers. A single word.
No coins, no yarrow — only the pattern already in front of you. Shao Yong's plum-blossom method turns a number, a time, a word into an upper and a lower trigram, finds the moving line, and reads what the moment is and what it becomes.
This very instant, cast the traditional way — year branch, month, day, and hour become the trigrams.
Any two numbers at all — the last digits of a phone, birds on a wire, the page you stopped on.
Its strokes divide into two halves — the first raises the upper trigram, the second the lower.
Let the hand decide. The instant you touch the blossom becomes the seed of the cast.
In the early-heaven arrangement every trigram carries a number, one to eight. Divide any number by eight and the remainder names the trigram — zero returns to Earth. Two of them stacked make your hexagram.
The first number, taken mod 8, raises the upper trigram (上卦); the second the lower (下卦). A remainder of zero is Earth, the eighth. Stack them and the sixty-four appear.
The sum of the numbers, taken mod 6, marks one of the six lines as moving — the single place where the present is already turning into something else.
The trigram holding the moving line is the 用 (yong) — the situation. The still trigram is the 體 (ti) — you. Their five-element relationship gives the verdict at a glance.
The cast hexagram (本卦) is now. Its inner lines two-to-five form the 互卦, the hidden middle. Flip the moving line and the 變卦 shows what it becomes.
Between your element and the situation's runs one of five relationships — generating (生) or overcoming (克). This alone tells favorable from adverse.
“I was watching plum blossoms when two sparrows fought for a branch and fell. From the hour I cast, and knew the flowers would break by the next evening.”