Consult the I Ching

The Yijing is among the oldest books in continuous use anywhere. Its sixty-four hexagrams — every combination of six broken or unbroken lines — carry a core text from the early Zhou period, roughly the ninth century BCE, with the Ten Wings commentaries added over the following centuries.

It was consulted as an oracle and studied as philosophy simultaneously, and both uses survive. The hexagrams describe situations in motion, which is why the changing lines matter as much as the figure itself: the oracle rarely tells you what is, only what is turning into what.

The Zhou Yi core dates to roughly the ninth century BCE; the Ten Wings — the philosophical commentaries that turned a divination manual into a classic — were layered on over the following five hundred years and traditionally attributed to Confucius' circle.

It reached Europe through Jesuit missionaries, fascinated Leibniz with its binary structure, and entered modern Western practice through Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German translation, which Cary Baynes rendered into English with a foreword by Carl Jung in 1950. Nearly every English reading today descends from that one lineage.

The Zhou Yi, the core layer of the I Ching, dates to roughly the ninth century BCE and was a manual for interpreting divination results long before it became a philosophical classic. The Ten Wings — the commentaries that turned it into a book about change itself — were added over the following six centuries.

The yarrow stalk method produces uneven odds for moving lines, and the three-coin method that replaced it does not. Purists still count stalks for that reason: the older procedure makes stable yin the most likely outcome, which subtly changes the character of the readings you get.