About
Yarrow Stalks is a free reading tool and a reference for the I Ching: cast a hexagram, land on its text, and read what the book says. No account, no subscription, nothing between the cast and the reading.
Every hexagram and every line has its own page: the Chinese text clause by clause with pinyin, James Legge's 1882 translation beside it, the commentaries set apart, a plain reading written from the text and checked against it, the related hexagrams, and the oldest forms of the characters in the name. The reading is a way of thinking about a question, not a prediction, and the site never claims otherwise.
Sources and rights
- The Chinese text is the Zhouyi (周易) as kept at Chinese Wikisource (維基文庫), public domain; each page links its source revision. This site's edits to it are CC BY-SA 4.0.
- The English of the text is James Legge, The Yî King, Sacred Books of the East vol. XVI, Oxford 1882, public domain, transcribed from the 1882 printing. No other translation is quoted.
- The ancient forms of the characters are from the character-evolution database of Academia Sinica (小學堂 字形演變), CC0.
- Pinyin follows Unihan (Unicode License v3) with this site's readings for the classical cases.
- The plain readings, the English glosses, the relations between hexagrams and the notes on words and history are this site's own.
Privacy
A reading you cast is kept in your own browser, with its date and your question; nothing is sent to a server, and a reading's link carries the hexagram only, never the question. The site counts visits and casts without cookies and without identifying anyone.