The Sixty-Four Figures of the I Ching

The sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching are six-line figures, each built from two of the eight trigrams stacked one above the other. Each line is either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang), and each hexagram has a name, an image, and a body of text, the judgement and the line statements, that make up the Book of Changes.

The core text is among the oldest in the Chinese canon, with the hexagram and line statements dating to the Western Zhou period, around the early first millennium BCE; the philosophical commentaries known as the Ten Wings were added later and shaped how the book was read.