Hasegawa Tōhaku's Pine Trees, the right-hand screen: pines in ink across six panels, some dark and near, most half lost in mist.
Hasegawa Tōhaku, Pine Trees (right-hand screen), late 16th century. Tokyo National Museum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Recursive I Ching

Read a hexagram to know yourself, not to be told your fate — the 64 changes, held as a mirror.

The classical text is public domain — a Zhou-dynasty divination manual, layered over centuries with commentary, popularized in the West through 20th-century translation. This library holds all 64 hexagrams in full, a contemplative reading practice built from them, and a cross-lens synthesis against Human Design gates, zodiac signs, and chakras. A hexagram is a mirror, not a command: read to reflect, never to obey.

The 64 Hexagrams — read the full text ↗ Three Lenses (a reading) ↗ The 64, one page each Browse every grammar
Read · the classical text

The 64 Hexagrams

Judgment, Image, and all six changing lines for every hexagram — the flagship reading text.
Compare · one entity, many lenses

Lenses

Cross-read the same hexagram across the collection's grammars, side by side.
Practice · contemplative, not divinatory

The Repair I Ching

Twelve hexagrams read as a repair practice — each one an invitation to find or make an image, not a fortune.

How to hold a hexagram

One faculty, two stances — across three thousand years · tap a node

antiquity
Omen
Adaptive · within limits

Zhou-dynasty diviners cast yarrow stalks for civic and agricultural timing — a bounded, communal craft, not a private fortune.
then, at its worst
Fate
Maladaptive

Read a hexagram as a fixed fortune and you obey the slice it shows you — a warrant for what must happen, not a conjecture held loosely.
now · ongoing
Mirror, not fate
Adaptive

Read a hexagram to know yourself, not to be told your fate — a contemplative prompt, held loosely, the choice always your own.

This library teaches the third stance — and keeps the first two honest, not hidden. The Repair I Ching is built entirely on that stance; the Three Lenses reading holds the tension between them.

Hakuin Ekaku's Daruma: Bodhidharma's face in a few washes of grey ink, eyes wide open, under a line of calligraphy, mounted as a hanging scroll.
Hakuin Ekaku, Portrait of Daruma, mid-18th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The one intention

A mirror, never a command

The I Ching's history is layered: a Zhou-dynasty (c. 1046–256 BCE) divination manual of hexagram and line judgments, overlaid across centuries with commentary (the "Ten Wings"), popularized in the West through translation (this library's 64-hexagram text is James Legge's public-domain English of 1882). Each grammar here is presented in its own terms — the classical judgments as classical judgments, the contemplative practice as a practice, the cross-lens synthesis as one synthesis among possible ones — never as this library's verdict on what a hexagram objectively means.

Where a source's provenance is genuinely uncertain, this library hedges rather than invents: unverified claims are marked as such, and a lens grammar's more speculative claims (Human Design's 1987 origin, for instance) are named plainly as speculative in the grammar's own description. Read the Three Lenses reading →

The paintings

Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

    Each file was made smaller for the web from the Wikimedia Commons file linked beside it, whose page states its licence. Nothing is cropped: inscriptions and seals stay. The list is also in the repo's NOTICE.

    The photograph of a printed I Ching used as a cover on this page and on several grammars: "I-Ching-chinese-book.jpg" by Cooltoye, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0, unmodified.