Hexagram 56旅The Wanderer
You are operating on ground that is not yours. The hexagram concedes only slight progress, and only for the wanderer who holds firm-correctness — dignity appropriate to the position, no attempt to claim the standing one would have at home, and no nest built where the building of nests will draw fire.
60-second read
The Wanderer is the hexagram for the actor operating off home ground. The hexagram statement concedes only slight progress, and only on condition that the wanderer holds firm-correctness. The instruction layer is the Xiang commentary's prescription, which translates the image of fire above the mountain into a specific governing posture: clarify and be cautious in administering judgement, and do not let disputes linger. Across the six lines the discipline is the same — dignity proper to the position, no claim on standing one would have at home, no nest built where it cannot be defended. The line-6 burning nest is the canonical warning.
The hexagram
旅：小亨，旅貞吉。
The Wanderer: slight progress. The wanderer who holds firm-correctness will be fortunate. — Translation by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese
“Lü intimates that (in the condition which it denotes) there may be some little attainment and progress. If the stranger or traveller be firm and correct as he ought to be, there will be good fortune.”
— James Legge, The Sacred Books of the East: The I Ching (1882), public domain.
The six lines
Click any line on the hexagram to read its passage. Use ↑ and ↓ after focusing the hexagram to step through the six positions.
旅瑣瑣，斯其所取災。
The wanderer mean and meanly occupied. This is how he brings calamity on himself.
“The first SIX, divided, shows the stranger mean and meanly occupied. It is thus that he brings on himself (further) calamity.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 1 is the yin at the bottom of the lower trigram Gen (mountain) — the first position the wanderer occupies when he steps off home ground, and the position at which the temptation to undersell himself is strongest. The classical phrase 瑣瑣 is doubled to intensify the smallness: not merely small in scope but petty in conduct, fussing over trivia, seizing the meanest of available occupations because no larger frame for the actor's standing has yet been established. The line is explicit that the calamity which follows is self-imposed. The wanderer is not punished by hostile locals; he punishes himself by accepting a frame so small that the rest of his stay must fit inside it.
In a decision context this is the line for the founder who arrives in a new market and accepts the first available distribution deal because it is the only one on the table, the operator who takes the first office the host company offers because complaining would be impolite, the senior executive who lets the new board treat him as a junior consultant because correcting them feels like overreach. The line names the mistake at its earliest moment. The corrective is not to make a scene; the corrective is to refuse the meanest scope before it sets. A wanderer who walks in at the level of his actual standing — neither inflated nor deflated — gives the host ground a calibration point against which the rest of the stay can be priced. A wanderer who accepts the line-1 frame surrenders that calibration and inherits the consequences across every line that follows.
旅即次，懷其資，得童僕貞。
The wanderer occupies his lodging-house, carries his means, and gains a trusty young servant.
“The second SIX, divided, shows the stranger, occupying his lodging-house, carrying with him his means of livelihood, and provided with good and trusty servants.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 2 is the centred yin in the lower trigram and the line at which the hexagram names what a well-positioned wanderer actually looks like. Three concrete provisions: 次 — a proper lodging, not a borrowed couch; 資 — his own means of livelihood, carried with him rather than dependent on the host; 童僕貞 — a young servant who is loyal. The line is unsentimental about what it takes to operate off home ground. Without a stable base of operations, without independent resources, and without at least one trustworthy local hand, the wanderer is reduced to the line-1 condition no matter how senior his standing at home.
The decision-relevant translation is operational. Founders entering a new market should not assume that home-market credibility substitutes for local infrastructure. Take the lease before the first meeting; bring the cap-table runway that does not depend on local closing the round; hire the first local hand before the first big push, even if the hire feels expensive for the stage. The line treats all three as preconditions rather than as outcomes. The same template applies to the parachuted executive: confirm the budget the new role actually controls, confirm the operational headcount one rung down, identify and earn the loyalty of one local lieutenant who can read the room when the wanderer cannot yet. The line's fortune is not named explicitly — line 2 simply describes a wanderer who has done the preparation — and the absence of an explicit 吉 is itself the lesson. Doing the preparation is what allows the rest of the hexagram to be navigable; doing it produces no fanfare because nothing has yet gone wrong.
旅焚其次，喪其童僕貞，厲。
The wanderer's lodging-house is burned; he loses his trusty young servant. Peril.
“The third NINE, undivided, shows the stranger, burning his lodging-house, and having lost his servants. However firm and correct he (try to) be, he will be in peril.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 3 is the top of the lower trigram and the line at which the line-2 provisions are lost. The image is severe: the lodging is burned, the loyal servant has been driven off, and the firm-correctness which carried the wanderer at lower positions no longer suffices. The peril is named without an exit. Read against line 2's quiet sufficiency, line 3 is the moment when the wanderer has either overreached his welcome — pushing where the host ground does not yet accept his weight — or has been caught in someone else's fire. Both readings produce the same line text and the same instruction.
For decision-makers this is the line of the founder whose local office is suddenly evicted because the landlord's larger deal collapsed, the executive whose hired local lieutenant resigns the same week the regional VP changes, the diplomat whose embassy posture becomes untenable because of a story he did not write. The line refuses the comfort of saying the wanderer caused the fire; it observes only that the wanderer is now standing in it. The decision-relevant move is to recognise that line 3 is not the line at which the wanderer rebuilds the lost lodging or recovers the lost servant. The wanderer at line 3 is the actor in retreat — moving to line 4's resting-place not as preference but as necessity. The instruction implicit in the peril is to stop trying to defend a position that has already burned, and to begin the move toward the line-4 axe and the line-5 charge that come later in the arc.
旅于處，得其資斧，我心不快。
The wanderer in a resting-place. He has gained his means and his axe. My heart is not at ease.
“The fourth NINE, undivided, shows the stranger in a resting-place, having also the means of livelihood and the axe (for his protection), (but he is saying), I am not at ease in my mind.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 4 is the bottom of the upper trigram Li (fire / brightness) and the first line on which the wanderer can speak in the first person. 我心不快 — my heart is not at ease. The line names a wanderer who has the technical provisions in place — 處 (a resting-place rather than the burned lodging-house), 資 (means restored after line 3's loss), 斧 (the axe, both tool and defence) — and who is nevertheless explicit that the technical sufficiency has not produced internal ease. The resting-place is not home; the axe is a reminder of the threat that justified carrying it.
For decision-makers this is the line of the founder who has re-established the foreign-market operation after the line-3 setback and who notices that the re-established operation does not feel like the original. The numbers are recoverable; the room is not the same. The line is honest about the cost of operating off home ground at length: a wanderer who is doing the work without internal ease can sustain the work for some time, but cannot mistake that sustainability for the kind of settled belonging that home-ground operations produce. The decision-relevant instruction is not to deny the unease — pretending to be at home accelerates the line-6 ending — but to name it accurately and to use the resting-place and the axe for what they are: provisional tools for a provisional posture. The fortune of the hexagram is reserved for line 5; line 4 is the line at which the wanderer holds the position and waits.
射雉一矢亡，終以譽命。
Shooting at a pheasant — one arrow is lost. In the end he obtains praise and a high charge.
“The fifth SIX, divided, shows its subject shooting a pheasant. He will lose his arrow, but in the end he will obtain praise and a (high) charge.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 5 is the ruler line of the hexagram and the position at which the centred yin in the upper trigram Li produces the only unambiguously fortunate outcome in the reading. The image is precise and unsentimental. The wanderer shoots at a pheasant — a single, specific, modestly-sized target proportionate to a traveller's standing — and the first arrow is lost. The line does not pretend the loss did not happen. It observes only that the end of the encounter is 譽命 — praise and a charge, the formal recognition by the host ground that the wanderer is worth taking seriously. The decision-relevant reading is exact. Line 5 is the line at which the wanderer's right-sized effort earns the host's regard, and the cost of the lost arrow is the price of admission rather than a setback.
For founders this is the line of the small foreign-market product win that opens a larger conversation — the pilot deployment that costs more than its revenue but that brings the regional buyer into the room. For operators it is the line of the modest demonstrated capability that produces the formal mandate the parachuted executive needed all along. The instruction is twofold. The first lesson is target selection: the line picks a pheasant, not a deer and not a tiger. Wanderers who aim too high at line 5 produce no praise and no charge; the host ground reads the over-reach as the line-1 mistake re-emerging at higher altitude. The second lesson is the willingness to spend the first arrow knowingly. The line treats the lost arrow as expected cost, not as failure. The 譽命 that follows is the fortune of the entire hexagram, and it concentrates at the position of the actor who is willing to take a modest, well-chosen shot and to accept the visible cost of the first attempt.
鳥焚其巢，旅人先笑後號咷，喪牛于易，凶。
The bird burns its nest. The wanderer first laughs, then cries and wails. He loses his ox at the border. Evil.
“The topmost NINE, undivided, shows a bird burning its nest. The stranger, (thus represented), first laughs and then cries out. He has lost his ox(-like docility) too readily and easily. There will be evil.”
— Legge (1882)
Line 6 is the topmost line and the I Ching's most precise picture of what happens when a wanderer mistakes the line-5 charge for the standing of a settled local actor. The bird has built a nest at altitude and then set it alight; the wanderer who laughed at his own arrival cries at his own departure; the ox — the patient, sturdy, slow-tempered animal whose docility carries the traveller across foreign ground — is lost at the border 易 (which the commentaries read both as a place name and as the word for ease or carelessness). The line is the canonical warning against the wanderer who, having received the line-5 praise and charge, attempts to convert it into the permanent standing that only home ground confers.
The decision-relevant translation is severe and corrective. Founders who win the line-5 pilot and then immediately commit to a permanent foreign headquarters before the underlying conditions support it tend to discover the burning nest within the same fiscal year. Executives who interpret the parachuted mandate as the start of a long tenure tend to lose the docility that earned them the mandate in the first place — the willingness to defer to local context, the patience to let the host ground set the pace. The line names both the laughter and the wailing. The laughter is the moment of apparent arrival; the wailing is what follows when the actor discovers that the laughter was the line-5 reward, not the start of a settled tenure. The instruction implicit in the image is the same as the hexagram statement's: hold firm-correctness through the line-5 charge, take the praise without converting it into a nest, and exit the wanderer's posture before line 6 forces the exit on terms the wanderer no longer controls. The hexagram's last word is 凶 — evil — and it is the only such marker in the reading. The cheapest moment to prevent it was the line-5 acceptance of the praise without the building of the nest.
PostureNot on home ground · dignity appropriate to position
The Wanderer is the structural pair to Hexagram 55 — Abundance. Where Hexagram 55 puts Li (fire / brightness) above Zhen (thunder / movement) — the peak of light over a generative ground — Hexagram 56 puts Li above Gen (mountain / stopping). The fire has climbed off the moving thunder onto the still mountain: the brightness is now travelling over ground that is not its own. The Xiang compresses the image into a single phrase: 山上有火，旅 — fire above the mountain, the Wanderer. That is the hexagram’s whole picture of operating off home ground: a luminous actor moving across terrain whose elements he does not control, whose grass he can ignite but whose mountain he does not own.
The hexagram statement is unusually compressed. 小亨，旅貞吉 — slight progress; the wanderer who holds firm-correctness will be fortunate. Two conditions are folded into eight characters. The first is the concession that progress is only slight: the wanderer is not entitled to the kind of momentum a settled actor on home ground can build. The second is the conditional fortune: 旅貞 — the wanderer’s firm-correctness — is what unlocks the modest fortune the hexagram offers. The discipline at every line is dignity appropriate to the position. Not the self-erasing dignity of the line-1 mean occupation, not the over-reaching dignity of a settled local actor, but the calibrated dignity of a traveller who knows the pheasant from the deer and shoots the pheasant first.
Failure modesMean and meanly occupied (line 1) · the burning nest (line 6)
The two structural failure modes sit at the bottom and at the top of the hexagram. Line 1 is the wanderer who undersells himself on arrival — 旅瑣瑣, mean and meanly occupied — and who thereby imports a frame so small that the rest of the stay must fit inside it. The mistake is not modesty; the mistake is accepting a calibration the host ground would not have insisted on. Line 6 is the inverse: the wanderer who, having received the line-5 praise and charge, attempts to convert provisional standing into permanent residence. The bird burns its own nest; the wanderer laughs first and wails second; the ox of docility is lost at the border. Both failures share a root: the wanderer who cannot read the difference between his actual standing and the standing he wishes he had. Line 1 is the under-claim; line 6 is the over-claim. The hexagram’s only unambiguous fortune sits at line 5 between them.
Application & adjacentQuestion shape · Hexagram 55 pair · The pheasant shot
A note on the question shape this hexagram answers best. The Wanderer rewards questions framed around an explicit off-home-ground posture — entering a new market, accepting a turnaround mandate inside a company you have not yet earned standing in, taking a diplomatic posting, joining a board you do not chair, moving to a city where you must rebuild a network. It is less useful for questions about whether to stay or leave a settled situation; for that question, re-read with Hexagram 32 — Duration — or Hexagram 33 — Retreat — depending on whether the question is about endurance or about timed withdrawal. The Wanderer presumes the move has been made or is committed. The hexagram is the instruction layer for what to do once the wanderer's posture has begun.
The canonical adjacent reading is Hexagram 55 — Abundance — the structural pair in the King Wen sequence. Where Hexagram 55 names the disciplines of an actor at the visible peak of his own ground — fire over thunder, brightness over movement — Hexagram 56 names the disciplines of the same brightness operating on ground that is not his own. The two together form the I Ching’s complete instruction for the full arc of a senior actor’s career: in Hexagram 55 the discipline is to hold the centre of one’s own light without overreaching; in Hexagram 56 the discipline is to walk lightly through another’s domain without forgetting which fire one carries. Founders and executives who keep both hexagrams in view tend to read transitions cleanly — recognising when they are at the home peak that 55 describes, and when they have crossed onto the foreign mountain that 56 marks.
The line-5 pheasant shot is the hexagram’s operational centre. Line 5 carries the only fortunate outcome in the reading, and it concentrates not at the position of arrival (line 2’s sufficient preparation) and not at the position of recovery (line 4’s axe and unease), but at the position of the right-sized shot. The decision-relevant move is twofold. If you are entering the wanderer’s posture, the instruction is to identify your pheasant in advance — a specific, modest, demonstrable win that the host ground will read as proportionate to your actual standing — and to accept that the first arrow will be lost. If you are operating inside the wanderer’s posture already, the instruction is to stop fundraising attention for the buffalo and to take the visible shot at the pheasant the host ground has already named. The fortune of the entire hexagram concentrates at the modest, well-chosen, knowingly expensive first attempt.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Each Western line of reading approaches the Wanderer from a different angle. James Legge transliterates 旅 as “Lü” and frames the hexagram within his Confucian moral lens — the stranger and traveller whose firm-correctness produces a modest fortune, with the line-by-line texts read as concrete portraits of foreign-ground conduct. Richard Wilhelm’s symbolic-philosophical posture reads the hexagram as “The Wanderer” in the more general sense — the perpetual condition of spiritual transit and the discipline of carrying one’s own light through unfamiliar terrain. A reading in the lineage of Carl Jung’s 1949 foreword would treat 56 as a marker of the soul’s wandering between psychic states, with the line-5 pheasant shot as the moment of provisional recognition by the unconscious of an ego that has done its preparation. Bradford Hatcher’s linguistic project (below) abandons all three framings and returns to the semantic field of 旅 itself — traveller, stranger, itinerant, peddler, newcomer, pilgrim, the full vocabulary range of provisional presence. None of these readings is quoted on this page; the synthesis is YiGram Editorial’s characterization of each tradition’s posture, written so a reader can triangulate the field without us reproducing copyrighted text.
Reception historyLegge · Wilhelm · Baynes · Jung
The Western reception of the I Ching has two main lines. The first is James Legge’s 1882 missionary translation in the Sacred Books of the East series — methodical, Victorian, framed around Confucian moral readings. It is the public-domain anchor reproduced above. The second is Richard Wilhelm’s 1923 German translation, prepared in Qingdao in collaboration with Lao Naixuan — sympathetic, philosophical, closer to Daoist intuitions. Cary F. Baynes rendered Wilhelm into English in 1950, with a foreword by Carl Jung that introduced the book to Western psychology as a window onto synchronicity and the unconscious.
We cite these two lines by name to credit the reception history and to help search systems and readers resolve the entities; the Wilhelm/Baynes text itself and Jung’s foreword remain in copyright and are not quoted on this page. A more recent academic-linguistic line is represented by Bradford Hatcher’s Yijing project (1990s–2010s), which appears in the next section under his explicit redistribution permission.
Bradford HatcherVerbatim · © 2011
Hatcher organizes each hexagram around six short clusters of keywords that sketch the field of decision and association the Chinese name opens onto. For Hexagram 56 旅, his clusters are:
Traveler, stranger, itinerant, peddler, newcomer, visitor, guest, disciple, pilgrim Walkabout, vision quest; perpetual novelty, insecurity; caravanserai, inn, shelter Portability, light travel, roughing it, going native; ad hoc life, living without a net Earning a welcome; tact, wit, modesty, self-reliance, versatility, a few good tools Dynamic equilibrium, self-sustaining systems; the tactics of intrusion, diplomacy Varieties of people who wander, as a source of uncertainty, curiosity & suspicion
Hatcher’s framing is vocabulary-centred rather than narrative — the reader is invited to feel the semantic shape of the Chinese name through the spread of English fragments. For his longer notes and the full glossary entry, read the complete passage on hermetica.info.
Quoted verbatim from Bradford Hatcher, Yijing Hexagram Names and Core Meanings (Version 12.1, 2011), hermetica.info/GuaMing.htm. © Bradford Hatcher, 2011. Reproduced under the author’s explicit permission to redistribute his work intact, with copyright notice. Bradford Hatcher (d. June 2020); site maintained to preserve his work.
SynthesisYiGram Editorial
Read across the four Chinese traditions, Hexagram 56 names a very specific working posture: an actor of real standing operating on ground that is not his own, and the corresponding discipline of calibrating every move to a wanderer’s actual entitlement rather than to the standing he would have at home. The Wings give the canonical reading: fire above the mountain, the Wanderer; the yielding attains the centre on the outside and follows the firm; stopping and adhering to brightness produces the slight progress and the conditional fortune. Wang Bi sharpens the structural reading: 旅 is a hexagram about scope rather than about ability, and the line-by-line texts describe specific attempts to claim more scope than the wanderer’s position warrants. Zhu Xi reframes the hexagram around the line-5 yielding-centre — the wanderer who accepts the lost arrow as the price of admission and receives the praise and charge in return — and stresses that the line-6 burning nest is the canonical picture of a wanderer who mistakes provisional reward for permanent standing. The divinatory manual Bushi Zhengzong reads 56 strictly as the marker for off-home-ground operation: travel, relocation, foreign appointment, transitional roles, disputes adjudicated on someone else’s terms. The unified posture across all four sources is the same: the Wanderer is a discipline for recognising which ground you actually stand on, calibrating dignity to that ground, and refusing the nest the line-5 reward seems to license.
Yi ZhuanTuan + Xiang · Ten Wings
The Ten Wings are the canonical Confucian commentary stratum embedded in the received Yijing. For Hexagram 56 the two most directly relevant Wings are the Tuan Zhuan (彖傳, the Judgement Commentary) and the Xiang Zhuan (象傳, the Image Commentary).
Tuan 彖傳: 旅，小亨，柔得中乎外而順乎剛，止而麗乎明，是以小亨，旅貞吉也。旅之時義大矣哉。
The Wanderer, slight progress — the yielding attains the centre on the outside and follows the firm; stopping and adhering to brightness — therefore “slight progress, the wanderer’s firm-correctness fortunate.” Vast indeed is the timely meaning of the Wanderer.
Xiang 象傳: 山上有火，旅。君子以明慎用刑，而不留獄。
Fire above the mountain — the Wanderer. The noble person accordingly clarifies and is cautious in administering punishments, and does not let litigation linger.
The Tuan does the structural work. The phrase 柔得中乎外 — the yielding attains the centre on the outside — names the line-5 position as the operational centre of the hexagram precisely because the centred yin sits in the outer trigram, where a wanderer actually operates. The compound 止而麗乎明 — stopping (Gen, the lower trigram) and adhering to brightness (Li, the upper trigram) — gives the hexagram its governing posture: the wanderer’s discipline is to stop where the host ground requires and to stay attached to the brightness he carries. The closing exclamation — 旅之時義大矣哉 — is the Wing’s rare emphatic marker, and it concentrates on timely meaning: the wanderer who can read what each moment of the journey requires. The Xiang then compresses the ethical instruction into eight characters — 明慎用刑，而不留獄, clarify and be cautious in administering punishments, and do not let litigation linger. The image is precise. Fire above the mountain is brief and illuminating; the noble person who must judge from a wanderer’s position cannot afford either rash sentences or matters that drag on past the brightness’s departure. Translations by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese.
Classical commentariesWang Bi · Zhu Xi · Bushi Zhengzong
Wang Bi (Zhouyi Zhu, 3rd century) reads Hexagram 56 as a hexagram about scope rather than about ability. For Wang Bi the analytical centre is the contrast between line 1’s undersold occupation and line 6’s overclaimed nest, with the centred yin at line 5 as the only position whose scope matches the wanderer’s actual entitlement. The hexagram’s decision logic, in Wang Bi’s reading, is the precise mapping of positions at which the wanderer either claims less than his standing warrants (lines 1 and arguably 3), claims roughly what it warrants (lines 2, 4, and 5), or claims more than the host ground will sustain (line 6).
Zhu Xi (Zhouyi Benyi, 1188) reframes the hexagram around the line-5 yielding centre — the wanderer who shoots a pheasant, loses the first arrow, and receives praise and a high charge. For Zhu Xi the line-5 譽命 is the entire hexagram’s only true fortune, precisely because no other position offers an unambiguously productive outcome. The corollary is that the wanderer must accept the visible cost of the lost first arrow as the structural condition of the eventual charge; a wanderer who refuses to spend the arrow does not receive the praise that follows. Zhu Xi reads the line-6 bird-burning-its-nest image as the canonical picture of a wanderer who has misread the line-5 reward as permanent residence rather than provisional charge.
The Bushi Zhengzong (Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709) reads 56 practically: a hexagram drawn in answer to a question about travel, relocation, foreign-market operation, transitional appointment, or adjudication on someone else’s terms. The manual is explicit that 56 is not a commentary on whether the wanderer is welcome; the cast applies whether the host ground is friendly, neutral, or hostile. The practical recommendation tracks the line position the question lands at: refuse the mean occupation at line 1; secure lodging, means, and a loyal local hand at line 2; expect the line-3 burned-lodging setback as part of the arc rather than as a verdict; hold the resting-place and the axe through line 4 without pretending to ease; take the right-sized shot at line 5; refuse to build the nest the line-5 praise seems to invite.
Translations and paraphrase by YiGram Editorial from the classical Chinese. We do not reuse any modern third-party English rendering of these commentaries.
These method notes are not required to read the hexagram. They organize the traditional six-line structure for readers who want to see the rule layer beneath the plain-language reading.
Palace: Li (fire), first-generation (一世). Binary, bottom-up: 001101. Lower trigram: Gen (mountain). Upper trigram: Li (fire). Shi line: 1. Ying line: 4.
The line branches, bottom-up, follow the Gen-below / Li-above najia composition for the Wanderer: 辰 (line 1), 午 (line 2), 申 (line 3), 酉 (line 4), 未 (line 5), 巳 (line 6). Read against the Li palace, whose element is fire, the six-relatives assignments are: line 1 辰 (earth) — offspring (子孫); line 2 午 (fire) — siblings (兄弟); line 3 申 (metal) — wealth (妻財); line 4 酉 (metal) — wealth (妻財); line 5 未 (earth) — offspring (子孫); line 6 巳 (fire) — siblings (兄弟).
The shi line at position 1 carries offspring (辰, earth) — the wanderer’s standing-point sits at the bottom of the hexagram in a position whose six-relative is the calming, restraining element rather than the palace’s own fire. That structural fact is the najia correlate of line 1’s warning: a wanderer who occupies his own position humbly (without ostentation but also without the line-1 mean-and-meanly-occupied collapse) is reading the shi’s offspring element correctly. The ying line at position 4 carries wealth (酉, metal) — the receiving position is the element fire melts. Read as a structural pair, the shi-ying axis of the Wanderer says that the actor’s humble standing-point faces a receiving position whose nature his own fire actively transforms. The structural correlate of theTuan’s 柔得中乎外而順乎剛: the yielding centre on the outside, which the wanderer must follow rather than seek to overcome.
For a cast, this static layer records the palace, generation label, shi and ying positions, each line's branch and six-relative, moving-line positions, transformed hexagram, and the use-spirit selected by question category. The public page keeps that structure as a method note rather than as default reading text.
Audit status: unaudited_draft. The static-layer tables are pulled from the standard 京房纳甲 sequence and have not yet been cross-checked against the three reference texts named in the methodology. Errors should be reported against the v0.1.0 rule version in the GitHub rules directory.
For the full pipeline (how the static layer reaches the AI interpretation), see Methodology → Najia engine.
Sources
- Classical text of the Yijing (周易) — hexagram and line statements (卦辭 / 爻辭) from the received Zhou-dynasty edition. Public domain.
- James Legge, The Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XVI: The Yi King, Oxford University Press, 1882. Public domain.
- Zhu Xi (朱熹), Zhouyi Benyi (周易本義), 1188. Public domain.
- Wang Bi (王弼), Zhouyi Zhu (周易注), 3rd century. Public domain.
- Bushi Zhengzong (卜筮正宗), Qing-dynasty divinatory manual, 1709. Public domain.
- Tuan Zhuan (彖傳) and Xiang Zhuan (象傳), two of the Ten Wings (十翼). Public domain.
- Bradford Hatcher, Yijing Hexagram Names and Core Meanings (Version 12.1, 2011). © Bradford Hatcher, 2011. Reproduced under the author’s explicit permission to redistribute his work intact, with copyright notice; this page quotes the “Key Words” subsection only and links readers to the full original for the longer notes. Bradford Hatcher (d. June 2020).
All Chinese-to-English translations on this page are by YiGram Editorial, working directly from the classical Chinese. We do not reuse third-party modern English translations of any of the listed Chinese sources. Read the full source policy in the methodology page.
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