Fifty Stalks · 五十策
Fifty Stalks is a quiet place to meet the I Ching in the traditional way: cast a hexagram with your own hands, read the classic in plain language, and keep a record of what you learn. No accounts, no ads, no tracking.
Why fifty stalks
The Great Commentary says: “The number of the great expansion is fifty; of these, forty-nine are used.” This is the oldest surviving method of consulting the I Ching: set one stalk aside, then divide and count the remaining forty-nine again and again until eighteen changes have produced six lines. Fifty Stalks keeps the whole process, and you divide the stalks yourself on the screen. Compared with tossing three coins, the yarrow method gives the changing lines different odds (old yin is the rarest, old yang more common), which is how the classic expects them to fall. It takes ten to twenty minutes, and that time is part of the practice: it lets the mind settle and the question become clear.
How to use it
Begin with a sincere, specific question, ideally about what you can do rather than a prediction about other people or outcomes. Choose the yarrow method (recommended) or the quick three-number method, take a quiet moment with the invocation, then begin. When the hexagram is complete, read the judgment and the Great Image first, then any changing lines and the hexagram they lead to. The Study section has short lessons that build from the symbols to reading and interpreting a hexagram. Keep each consultation in your Journal; looking back over time is where understanding grows.
Text and sources
The classical text follows the received edition on Wikisource. Each hexagram is read in the traditional order: name, image, sequence, judgment, the Tuan commentary, the Great Image, the six lines and the ruling line, followed by stories and reflections. The wording is this site’s own, drawing on the long commentarial tradition and modern scholarship; any errors are ours.
The English of the classical text is James Legge’s public-domain translation of 1882. The Japanese kakikudashi readings are our own, checked against a public-domain edition of 1922. Chinese type is set in LXGW WenKai, used under the SIL Open Font License.
Contact
Found a typo, have a question about a translation, or a suggestion? Please write: contact@fiftystalks.com
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Privacy: casting, the text and the commentary all run on your device. There are no accounts, no tracking and no ads, and the site keeps none of your questions or readings; to keep one, share, copy or save it as a file yourself. The one exception is the AI reading, which uses a large language model (DeepSeek) to interpret the cast. Only if you choose it and agree are the hexagram you received (with its changing lines), your language and any question you wrote (or the reading you ask to have translated) sent via Cloudflare to DeepSeek to write the reply. This site does not record them; what DeepSeek does is governed by its own terms. To limit how often each person can ask per day, the Worker keeps only a one-way hash derived from your connection address, never the address itself.
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