I Ching Hexagrams

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.

The I Ching is consulted by generating a hexagram, traditionally by sorting yarrow stalks, later by tossing coins, and reading the text for the figure obtained, with changing lines pointing to a second hexagram. But it is at once a divination manual and a work of cosmology and ethics, and Confucian and Taoist thinkers alike read it as a map of change and of the way of things.

The atlas gives each hexagram its structure, name, image and core meaning. The eight trigrams that compose the hexagrams are treated in their own category, and the same sixty-four figures underlie the modern Human Design gates and Gene Keys.