Consulting the I Ging: How to Use the Book of Changes as a Decision-Making Practice

Consulting the I Ging — anyone doing it for the first time will find hundreds of websites promising a click and delivering a hexagram. Throw three coins, count the lines, read the answer. What gets lost is everything that makes consulting the Book of Changes a philosophical practice: the inner composure, the reverence for a process you do not control, and the willingness to receive an answer that may contradict your wishes.

#Why the Question Matters More Than the Method

If you want to consult the I Ging, you do not begin with coins. The real work begins with the question.

Richard Wilhelm describes the process as follows: the questioner formulates his concern precisely in words and then receives the answer without regard to whether it concerns the near or the distant, the secret or the deep (cf. Wilhelm, 1924, p. 290). That sounds simple, but it is the most demanding stage of the entire practice. Because formulating a question precisely requires that you already know what is actually moving you — not what you superficially take your concern to be, but what is genuinely at work within you.

In my seminars, I witness the same moment again and again: someone wants to consult the I Ging and arrives with a question like “Should I change jobs?” or “Is this relationship right for me?” Before a single coin is thrown, we work on the question itself. What lies behind the wish to change jobs? What exactly do you mean by “right”? Which answer do you fear? Often the question changes completely before the oracle is consulted at all. And sometimes the process of formulating the question already reveals the answer — long before the coins fall.

#The Coin Oracle Step by Step

The coin method (coin oracle) is the most widely used way of consulting the I Ging. Richard Wilhelm describes it in his translation: you take three coins, which are thrown simultaneously. One throw yields one line. One side counts as Yin with a value of 2, the other as Yang with a value of 3 (cf. Wilhelm, 1924, p. 338).

The sum of the three coins determines the character of the line:

You throw six times and build the hexagram from bottom to top. The old lines (6 and 9) are the changing lines — they transform into their opposite and generate a second hexagram that shows the developmental tendency of the situation.

It sounds like a mechanical procedure. In practice, it is something else. The deceleration produced by the physical act of throwing, the waiting between individual throws, the writing down of the lines — this process creates a space. And in that space, something happens that eludes rational grasp — something C.G. Jung described as synchronicity: a meaningful coincidence that knows no causal explanation.

#Reverence as a Prerequisite

The I Ging does not answer everyone in the same way. This is not an esoteric statement but a practical observation that anyone who has worked seriously with the book can confirm.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes this attitude in her work: reverence for the consciousness process the other person is going through, and for its non-triviality — this applies to philosophical accompaniment just as much as to consulting the I Ging. The question of powerlessness, of asserting one’s integrity in the world, is an existential question that moves people deeply. You cannot simply arrive with ready-made answers (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Interview 04).

The I Ging presupposes something specific: that the questioner is a Noble, a person who wants to take responsibility for their own life. Gwendolin puts it this way: the Yijing assumes that you are a Noble, and in that sense it subtly educates you towards becoming one. You are addressed as a Noble, because otherwise you would not be consulting the Yijing — after all, you want to take responsibility for your life. The higher self within a person, their actual form, is what is being addressed (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2025, 40:12).

The oracle does not serve the wishes and interests of the person who brings the concern. It reveals how things are — how they are and what the quality within them is. The oracle represents an interface between space in its totality and the concern of a petitioner (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Interview 04).

#Why Online Oracles Miss the Point

Anyone searching for “I Ching online” or typing “consult the I Ching” into a search engine will find dozens of sites with random number generators. One click, one hexagram, one interpretive text. The method works algorithmically — the probability distribution matches the coin oracle. What is missing is everything else.

The physical act of throwing coins creates a deceleration that clicking a button cannot replace. The conscious composure before the consultation, the growing still, the formulation of the question in your own words — these steps fall away when the medium is a screen. What remains is what Gwendolin warns against: an increasing outsourcing of human functions to machines. Everything we outsource is a cognitive function we then have less of (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Everlast AI, 45:32).

The I Ging is not an information system you can query. It is a counterpart that answers when you consult it seriously. China is the only culture that grounds its core philosophical text in change and in the laws of transformation themselves — that has translated the Heraclitean “everything flows” into its core philosophy and integrates this flow into cultural life (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2025, SYMPOSIUM, 10:00). A random number generator stands outside that flow.

#The Practice in Accompaniment

In my seminars on the I Ging (2 days, 350 EUR), I work with participants who want to consult the Book of Changes seriously for the first time. The process follows no rigid method but a principle: before you consult the oracle, you must consult yourself.

This begins with clarifying the concern. What is really moving you? Not the surface, not the obvious, but what lies beneath. Then the formulation of the question — clear, open, without a hidden desired answer. Then the consultation itself, in silence, with coins and paper. And finally the shared interpretation, where the hexagram is read not as a prescription but as an image of a situation that wants to be understood.

What surprises participants most is the moment the hexagram makes visible something they already knew but had not yet spoken aloud. The oracle does not provide new information. It gives what is already at work within you a language and a structure. That is its value as a decision-making aid: not in the answer, but in the clarity that arises through the process of asking.

#What the I Ging Actually Achieves as a Decision-Making Practice

The I Ging is not a decision-making tool in the modern sense — not an instrument that relieves you of the decision. It is a practice that trains your capacity for judgement. The difference is fundamental: a tool replaces an ability; a practice develops it.

Anyone who learns to consult the I Ging seriously practises three things: the ability to formulate a question so that it hits the core; the patience to receive an answer that may contradict one’s expectations; and the wisdom to distinguish between action and non-action — between an impulse arising from the matter itself and a nervous need for control masquerading as a sense of responsibility.

Anyone who develops these three capacities eventually needs the oracle less. Consulting the I Ging is the path, not the destination. The Book of Changes educates its readers towards independence — subtly, without moralising, by consistently addressing them as Nobles who already know what is right, if they are ready to hear it.

If this approach to the I Ging speaks to you, you can find out more about me and my work here.

#Sources

Wilhelm, R. (1924). I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen. Diederichs.

Kirchhoff, G. (2025). “Politische Weisheit in der chinesischen Philosophie — Konfuzius, Mengzi und das I Ging” [Video]. Gwendolin Kirchhoff, YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=SRhjoVeim_8.