六十四卦 · the sixty-four
六十四卦

The Hexagrams, and the Gates They Open

Every hexagram is two trigrams, one set upon the other. And every trigram, in the Mysterious Turtle and Soaring methods, names a confluent point of the eight extraordinary vessels. So each of the sixty-four carries two gates — one below, one above. Search by name, or filter by the vessel you have in mind.

八卦The Eight Images

Read in the Japanese manner — hakke, the eight. Each is a picture before it is a meaning: three lines, and a thing in the world. The family positions, body parts and animals below are those given in the Shuōguà 說卦, the Discussion of the Trigrams.

The trigram-to-point correspondence is the one given in Líng Guī Bā Fǎ and Fēi Téng Bā Fǎ — both methods use the same eight gates. The first line under each hexagram is a brief working gloss, not a translation. Beneath it, where transcribed, is James Legge's rendering of King Wen's judgment (1882, Sacred Books of the East vol. XVI — public domain); where it has not yet been transcribed the link goes to the source page. For the Chinese, see ctext.org. Reading a hexagram as a pair of vessels is a correspondence, not a prescription — it says which gates the figure touches, not what to needle.