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I Ching FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

[top] Why do you use four coins for your Oracle?

You may have seen many I Ching practitioners or online Oracles use a three coin method for their divination. So why is ours different? When the majority of the clarification and significance of the I Ching hexagrams was being settled upon, the most common divination method was to use yarrow stalks. This is a very slow, deliberate, and meditative process that takes about 20 minutes to finish for a single reading. This process is intended to clear the mind so that it will be receptive to the Oracle's answer and many serious I Ching practitioners still prefer it to this day.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to reproduce in online form, and of course no one wants to wait 20 minutes for their answers in this modern Western age! As a result, an easier, shortcut method was created, the three coin toss. This is widely used both online and physically by many practitioners, but an analysis of the two methods shows that the three coin toss does not reproduce the same probabilities as the yarrow stalk method. Specifically, the number of the old (changing) yin and yang lines (and the resulting future hexagrams) do not sync up with what the original diviners of the I Ching methodology intended.

Fortunately, there is a method that is just as easy to do (at least for a computer), the four coin method, that reproduces the same results as the yarrow stalk method. The four coin toss produces just as few old yin lines, and just as many old yang lines, as the preferred yarrow stalk divination. For an even more in-depth analysis of the probabilities of I Ching divination, please visit some of these sites:

[top] Just how random is the Oracle anyhow?

When you have JavaScript enabled (which most people do), the Oracle is using the standard random number generator from your very own PC. While this pseudo-random number generator (or PRNG, as they're called) is probably not "random enough" for use in your Top Secret cryptographic applications, it's used for everyday randomness in your computer all the time. For most purposes, it is more than "random enough". If you do not have JavaScript enabled, the answer is nearly the same, except that the random number generation is happening in a PRNG on the webserver, instead of on your computer directly.

In either case, it helps to think of the random number generation as part of the Oracle itself, so that its exact state at the time of your question is probably part of the whole scheme of things anyway. As a result, you are no doubt getting the answer you're supposed to :). For a lot more detail on computerized random number generation in general (a very important mathematical topic, by the way), you might start out at the Wikipedia page on this subject.

[top] What is a Lucky Honu?

A honu is a Hawaiian sea turtle. We hope our imaginary mascot happens to be full of good fortune.

[top] What is the difference between the present hexagram and the future hexagram?

As you are tossing the coins to build your hexagram, you may notice that you sometimes get odd looking lines, like this or this . When this happens, it indicates an "old" or "changing" line in the hexagram. This means that the hexagram for your divination is in a process of changing from a present state to a future state.

The I Ching does not say exactly how long this changing process is supposed to take, but in general the focus should initially be on the present state (the first hexagram). However, the answer is in the process of changing to the future hexagram on a timescale typically thought to be in days, weeks, or months (as opposed to years or decades), so you should very much keep the future hexagram in mind as you move forward.

In fact, exactly which lines are changing is also a very important part of each hexagram and how it pertains to your question, but this is a very detailed and in depth analysis that is difficult to do in such a simplified setting. A full I Ching consultation would certainly take these nuances into account.

 

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