What is I ching?

The I Ching (Wade-Giles), YiJing (Pinyin), Classic of Changes or Book of Changes; also called Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. The book contains a divination system comparable to Western geomancy or the West African Ifa system. In Western cultures and modern East Asia, it is still widely used for this purpose.

The text of the I Ching is a set of oracular statements represented by 64 sets of six lines each called hexagrams . Each hexagram is a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines , each line is either Yang (an unbroken, or solid line), or Yin (broken, an open line with a gap in the center). With six such lines stacked from bottom to top there are 26 or 64 possible combinations, and thus 64 hexagrams represented.