From cosmology to daily life

These systems are not purely theoretical. The stems and branches number years, months, days and hours and underlie the Chinese zodiac; the solar terms schedule planting and harvest; the meridians organise acupuncture and the pulse; the trigrams and hexagrams are consulted for guidance. The material reaches from the oldest strata of the Chinese canon to systems carried into Japan and Korea, where the godai and the mudras of Shingon and other schools took their own form.

The I Ching itself, whose hexagrams these trigrams build, sits at the border of this section and Tarot, Runes & Number, since it is at once a cosmology and a method of divination.