The Way of Casting

Three conditions, and how to frame a question

Divination has three conditions, the sān bù zhàn 三不占, three cases in which you do not cast. Without sincerity, do not cast. Without rightness, do not cast. Rightness (yì 義) means legitimacy. An improper question will not yield a meaningful answer, and a matter that is none of your business has no legitimacy either: someone living a thousand miles away asking whether two nations will go to war, for example. Without genuine doubt, do not cast. If reason and experience can settle it, do not trouble the oracle. Cast only when reason and experience cannot give a clear answer.

Rules for framing the question: 1. One matter at a time, and have a real question first. Casting out of idle boredom wastes effort. 2. Be concrete. Not “is buying a flat a good idea?” in the abstract, but this particular flat, once you have seen it and liked it. Break large questions into small ones. 3. No either/or. Do not ask “school A or school B?”. Ask twice: “what if I go to A?” and “what if I go to B?”. The best form is “if I make this choice, what will follow?”, not “what should I do?”. 4. Do not repeat. Once you have an answer, wait three months, one season, before asking the same question, because by then the conditions have changed. Nor may you cast with numbers, dislike the result, and then re-ask with the stalks. Switching methods to ask again breaks the first condition, sincerity.

Preparation and the invocation

Cast in the morning if you can, soon after rising, when the mind is clear and focused; in the evening, tired, you are likely to miscount a stalk. Settle your question beforehand, have pen and paper ready, and hold the fifty yarrow stalks (today usually purpose-made counting sticks) in your hands. Without proper stalks, a set of fifty toothpicks will do. The whole procedure takes about twenty minutes. Be patient, and trust that your question deserves the time.

Before casting, the ancients silently recited an invocation: “I borrow you, great yarrow, constant as you are. I, so-and-so, now on such-and-such a matter, do not know whether it may be done. I put my doubt before the spirits. Of fortune and misfortune, gain and loss, regret, distress, worry and deliberation: you who have the spirit, make it clear to me.” “Great yarrow” is a respectful address to the stalks, which the ancients regarded as a natural spirit-plant; “constant” means it conveys a steady kind of wisdom. In the middle you state your name and your question; at the end you ask that fortune and misfortune, gain and loss, regret and distress be made plain. With a tortoise shell one said “great tortoise” instead.

You need not recite it word for word; it is an ancient custom. What matters is sincerity in the heart, something like: “I truly have a question; please help me understand.” If you have cast before without any invocation, it does not matter. Sincerity counts for more than recitation.

The Great Expansion method, step by step

The Great Commentary says: “The number of the Great Expansion is fifty; of these, forty-nine are used.” The procedure:

1. Count carefully to make sure there are fifty. Take one out and lay it directly in front of you. It stands for the Supreme Ultimate, tàijí 太極, and is never touched again. You work with forty-nine. 2. Gather the forty-nine together on the table and divide them at random into two piles. Do not count; you could not anyway. Divide on the table, not in your hands, where you might unconsciously steer the numbers. This is what the classics call “the counsel of spirits”: with so many stalks, no one can manipulate the split. 3. Take one stalk from the LEFT pile and hold it between your fingers. 4. Count off the left pile in fours; take out the remainder, one, two, three or four stalks (four if it divides exactly), and add it to your hand. From the right pile take no extra stalk; simply count it off in fours and take out the remainder the same way. 5. Lay everything now in your hand at the front left, set diagonally and apart from later rounds, so you can see how many rounds you have done. 6. Gather the remaining stalks and repeat steps 2 to 5 for a second and a third round. After three rounds, count how many groups of four remain on the table. It will be 6, 7, 8 or 9. That is one line. 7. Write the number at the bottom of the paper. Gather all the stalks except the Supreme Ultimate, forty-nine again, and do three more rounds for the second line, written above the first. Build upward: six lines of three rounds each, eighteen changes in all, as the classic says, “in eighteen changes the hexagram is formed.”

Seven and nine are yang lines; six and eight are yin lines. Six and nine turn up less often, and they are the lines that change. Manuals differ on small details, such as whether the extra stalk comes from the left or the right pile; choose one way and keep to it.

The quick number method, and a cast each season

When you have no stalks with you, the number method takes under three minutes:

1. Take three three-digit numbers. 2. Divide the first by eight. The remainder gives the LOWER trigram by the Earlier Heaven numbers: Qian 1, Dui 2, Li 3, Zhen 4, Xun 5, Kan 6, Gen 7, Kun 8. A remainder of zero counts as 8, Kun. 3. Divide the second by eight in the same way to get the UPPER trigram. 4. Divide the third by six. The remainder is the changing line, counted from the bottom; zero counts as 6, the top line.

Say the numbers are 756, 123 and 312. 756 ÷ 8 leaves 4: Zhen, the lower trigram. 123 ÷ 8 leaves 3: Li, the upper trigram. 312 ÷ 6 leaves nothing, so 6: the top line changes. The result is Shìhé 噬嗑, Biting Through, Fire over Thunder, with its top line changing. The number method always yields exactly one changing line, so the answer is precise: it lies in that one line statement.

Where the numbers come from matters. Do not make them up. Invented numbers are always the same few, phone numbers, house numbers, birthdays, and anyone quick at mental arithmetic may unconsciously engineer the line he wants. Use numbers that simply happen to appear: the time on the clock, the plate of a passing car, a phone number on a billboard. Keep the chance meaningful. Even so, the yarrow method remains preferable, because no one can tamper with it.

One habit worth adopting: cast once every three months, at the turn of each season, asking about the general shape of the coming quarter so you can prepare the right attitude; and cast specially when a major decision arrives.