Six horizontal lines, three below and three above, some unbroken, some broken in the middle: the hexagram is a figure that looks abstract at first glance and, on closer inspection, depicts a situation. It is not a sign in the way a letter is, and not a symbol in the way a cipher is, but a constructed image. Whoever reads it is not reading a concept but a constellation. The hexagram is the basic building block of the I Ching, and each of its six lines carries, at its position, a particular meaning that only unfolds from the structure of the whole.
#Three Levels in One Figure
The classical teaching of the I Ching assigns the six lines to three levels. The two lower lines count as earth, the middle two as the human being, the two upper as heaven. This threefold division is not a decorative image but a cosmological statement: every situation a person stands in is thought between earth and heaven, and the person themselves forms the middle layer, in which the movement between the two takes place. The Chinese character gua (卦), usually translated as hexagram, originally designates a drawn oracle image. The hexagram is thus already, by the meaning of its word, what it is supposed to achieve: a made-visible situation.
In this threefold division lies the inner reason why the I Ching depicts reality in precisely six-part figures. A situation, on this view, always has a heavenly, a human, and an earthly aspect, and each of these aspects moves between an ascending and a resting line. The unbroken line stands for yang, the bright, firm, and moving. The broken line stands for yin, the dark, soft, and receiving. The six positions further carry a sequence: the lowest line marks the beginning of the movement, the uppermost its end or its excess. A line in the wrong place changes the character of the entire hexagram.
#Not a Catalogue, but a Web of Transitions
The 64 hexagrams are often described as a stock of 64 states. This description falls short. The figure 64 results purely mathematically from two line types and six positions, that is, from 2 to the power of 6 combinations. What matters more is that the hexagrams do not stand isolated side by side, but are connected to one another through changing lines. A line marked as changing at the moment of consultation transforms the starting hexagram into a second one. The consultation thus does not yield one image but a pair, describing a transition.
This creates a web. Every hexagram is connected to many others, and the whole book maps the topology of possible transitions. Whoever, in the I Ching, encounters Hexagram 11, Peace, and finds within it a changing line leading to Hexagram 12, Stagnation, is not reading two states but the inner logic of a tipping point. The I Ching thinks in transitions, not in inventories, and the hexagram is the instrument in which this thinking is condensed. Richard Wilhelm puts it this way in his introduction: the judgements indicate whether an action brings good or ill fortune, remorse or humiliation, and thereby put the person in a position to decide freely (Wilhelm, 1924, p. 19; English edition: The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. C. F. Baynes, 1950).
#Analogy as the Key to Reading
Why can a figure of six lines depict a life situation? The answer lies in the analogy model. It rests on the assumption that reality is analogically structured — that structural correspondences exist between levels that outwardly have nothing to do with one another. What shows itself, on the level of the body, as tension between activity and withdrawal has a parallel on the level of the social field, of seasonal nature, and of cosmic movement. The hexagram uses this analogy as a key to reading: the six lines provide a basic constellation that can be found again, in equal measure, on different levels.
This premise is not a magical thesis but a natural-philosophical one. The early Romantic and Idealist natural philosophy of Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe works with the same basic assumption, even if it chooses different figures. In the I Ching, the principle of analogy takes the form of a fixed alphabet: eight trigrams, each formed of three lines, stand for the primal forces heaven, earth, water, fire, mountain, lake, thunder, and wind. Two trigrams stacked on top of each other form a hexagram, and from eight times eight arises the spectrum of 64 figures. Each figure is thus a legible composite of elementary tensions, not an arbitrary sign. The cosmic anthropos, who recognises the outer world again within, finds in the hexagram a script that takes exactly this correspondence seriously.
#The Ten Wings and the Philosophical Elevation
The I Ching is not a single-layered book. Its oldest stratum consists of the judgements on the 64 hexagrams and the short texts on the individual lines. It belongs to the Zhou dynasty, between the tenth and eighth centuries BCE. Around this archaic stratum lie the so-called Ten Wings, philosophical commentaries attributed to Confucius (551–479 BCE) and his school. In them, the hexagram turns from an oracle image into an object of philosophical reflection. The Great Commentary, the Da Zhuan, interprets the lines as the expression of an ordered change underlying the cosmos as a whole, lifting the hexagram from the technique of divination onto the level of a theory of reality.
Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) preserved this layering of the source faithfully when he rendered the I Ching into German between 1913 and 1923, under the guidance of the Chinese scholar Lao Nai-hsüan. His edition, published by Diederichs in Jena in 1924, remains the standard German version to this day (Wilhelm, 1924). Carl Gustav Jung wrote the foreword to the 1950 English translation and proposed there that the hexagram be read not as the product of a causal connection, but as the expression of a synchronistic principle: sign and situation occur together without one causing the other (Jung, 1950). This made the hexagram legible, in European reception, as a figure that does not prove but bears witness.
#Reading the Present, Not Predicting the Future
The widespread impression that a hexagram answers the question of what will happen is a shortening. The hexagram answers the question of where the present stands and into what movement it is embedded. Wilhelm describes the act of consultation such that, through dividing the yarrow stalks or tossing coins, the unconscious in the person is granted the possibility to become active (Wilhelm, 1924, p. 22). Rational control is interrupted for a moment, so that a perception that has already been waiting behind the arguments can take its place.
What the hexagram trains is not clairvoyance but judgement: the capacity to perceive a situation in its inner dynamic such that the fitting action arises from the perception itself. Wisdom, in this tradition, means learning to feel the difference between an impulse to act that comes from the matter itself and a nervous need for control. The hexagram offers a repertoire of situational images against which this sense can be sharpened. Whoever consults a hexagram over years gradually builds an inner archive in which recurring constellations are recognised again. The figure becomes a counterpart, not an oracle in the popular sense.
#The Hexagram in Philosophical Practice
In work with people facing a decision, the hexagram becomes an instrument of slowing down. A client describes a situation, and the drawn hexagram sets against this description an image that shows elements the description still lacked. The drawn image neither confirms nor contradicts. It shifts attention. Where the mind seeks an unambiguous answer, the figure offers a pattern in which several forces become visible at once. The decision doesn’t get easier afterward, but it gets made with better information, because the tensions that were previously unspoken now carry a visible shape.
The hexagram is thus no esoteric tool but a philosophical one. It stands in the long tradition in which images are understood as instruments of thought, from Greek diagrams through the emblem books of the early modern period to the figure-theory of German Idealism. Its particularity lies in getting by with only two line types and six positions while still depicting the whole richness of transition. In the seminars on the art of decision, the hexagram is used so that this way of reading — which is neither analysis nor mere feeling — can be practised. The hexagram teaches how to let a situation stand until it shows itself.
#Sources
- Jung, C. G. (1950). Foreword. In: R. Wilhelm (trans.), The I Ching or Book of Changes (English edition, C. F. Baynes, trans.). New York: Pantheon Books.
- Wilhelm, R. (trans.) (1924). I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen. Jena: Diederichs. English edition: The I Ching or Book of Changes (C. F. Baynes, trans., 1950). New York: Pantheon Books.