THE BOOK OF CHANGES
I Ching Hexagrams
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is a classical Chinese text organized around 64 six-line figures called hexagrams. Each combines a lower and an upper trigram. Use your recorded hexagram number to find its published guide below; keep any changing-line positions with that record. Traditional figure reference.
Directory of the 64 I Ching hexagrams
Only published guides appear in this directory. Each entry opens its own address; additional entries appear when their pages are available.
- I Ching Hexagram 14
Great Possession: Fire above Heaven, with line-position checks and practical resource exercises.
Eight trigrams, two positions
A trigram has three lines. A hexagram places one trigram below another, giving six lines in all. The lower and upper positions are distinct: exchanging them can change the figure. The traditional symbols and natural images are described in Legge’s trigram reference.
| Symbol | Name | Natural image |
|---|---|---|
| ☰ | Qian | Heaven |
| ☷ | Kun | Earth |
| ☳ | Zhen | Thunder |
| ☴ | Xun | Wind |
| ☵ | Kan | Water |
| ☲ | Li | Fire |
| ☶ | Gen | Mountain |
| ☱ | Dui | Lake |
Names can look different across editions: Qian appears as Khien in Legge’s older spelling, for example. Compare the figure and its upper and lower symbols instead of assuming different spellings mean different hexagrams.
Why are there 64 figures?
Each of the six positions can be solid or broken. That gives 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 64 patterns. Equivalently, eight choices below and eight above give 8 × 8 = 64. These are counts of drawings, not scores or promises about events.
What to keep beside the number
Keep the original six-line drawing, count positions from the bottom, and preserve any separate record of changing lines. A hexagram number identifies a figure; it does not tell this directory which lines changed in your reading. Individual guides distinguish the traditional text from our worked checks.