How to Cast the I Ching with Three Coins: A Complete Beginner's Guide

The three-coin method is the most widely used way to consult the I Ching, and for good reason: it needs nothing but three identical coins, five minutes, and a question you actually care about. This guide walks through the whole procedure — what the coins mean, how to build a hexagram line by line, and what to do when lines change. No prior experience assumed.

One note on framing before we begin. A cast does not tell you what will happen. It hands you a structured symbol — a configuration of six lines with a long interpretive tradition attached — and invites you to think your situation through against it. The value is in the reflection the symbol provokes, not in any claim about the future. If you want the fuller philosophy behind that stance, the about page says it plainly.

What you need

• Three coins. Any coins work as long as they are the same kind. Traditionally Chinese cash coins are used, but three ordinary coins are perfectly fine.
• A question. Open-ended questions work better than yes-or-no ones. "What should I understand about this job decision" gives the symbols more to grip than "should I take the job."
• Something to write with. You will record six lines, built from the bottom up.

Decide once, before you start, which face counts as which: conventionally, tails (or the inscribed side) is worth 2 and heads is worth 3. It does not matter which you choose — only that you keep it fixed.

The core procedure

Step 1: Settle and ask

Hold the question in mind. Some people write it down; this is worth doing, because a precisely worded question makes the later reflection much sharper.

Step 2: Throw all three coins together

Toss the three coins and add up their values. With each coin worth 2 or 3, only four sums are possible:

• 6 — three tails (2+2+2)
• 7 — two tails and one head (2+2+3)
• 8 — one tail and two heads (2+3+3)
• 9 — three heads (3+3+3)

Step 3: Convert the sum into a line

Each sum corresponds to one of four line types:

• 6 = old yin. A broken line that is changing. Mark it with a cross or an X through the gap.
• 7 = young yang. A solid line, stable. Draw it plain.
• 8 = young yin. A broken line, stable. Draw it plain.
• 9 = old yang. A solid line that is changing. Mark it with a circle.

"Old" lines are lines at the extreme of their nature, about to tip into their opposite. "Young" lines are settled and stay put. Notice the arithmetic is not symmetric in feel but is in structure: even sums give yin (broken), odd sums give yang (solid); the extreme sums, 6 and 9, are the movers.

Step 4: Repeat six times, building from the bottom

Throw the coins six times in total. The first throw is the bottom line; the sixth throw is the top line. The hexagram grows upward like a plant. This ordering matters — reversing it produces a different hexagram entirely.

Step 5: Identify your primary hexagram

Read your six lines (ignoring, for the moment, which are old) as a pattern of broken and solid. Look the pattern up — the Six Doors encyclopedia indexes all sixty-four — and you have your primary hexagram, the main answer of the cast. It describes, in the tradition's terms, the situation as it stands.

Step 6: Derive the secondary hexagram

If any lines came up 6 or 9, flip each of them into its opposite: old yin becomes solid, old yang becomes broken. Stable lines stay as they are. The resulting pattern is your secondary hexagram — where the situation is tending as its most strained elements give way. If no lines are old, there is no secondary hexagram; the reading rests entirely in the primary.

The changing lines themselves carry specific line texts and are usually the most pointed part of a reading. How to weigh one changing line against three or five is a craft of its own, covered in our guide to changing lines.

A worked example

Suppose your six throws, bottom to top, give: 7, 8, 9, 8, 8, 7. That is: solid, broken, solid-changing, broken, broken, solid. The third line is old yang. Your primary hexagram is this pattern as thrown; your secondary hexagram is the same pattern with the third line flipped to broken. You would read the primary hexagram's text, give particular attention to the third line's text, and then read the secondary hexagram as the direction of development.

Why the odds are uneven — and why that's fine

With three coins, the stable line types (7 and 8) each occur three times in eight throws, while the changing types (6 and 9) each occur once in eight. So roughly one line in four changes, and a six-line cast averages about one and a half changing lines. The older yarrow-stalk ritual produces slightly different probabilities; the coin method is a later simplification that the tradition has long accepted. What matters for practice is not the exact distribution but that the outcome is genuinely out of your hands.

Casting digitally, without taking it on faith

Physical coins prove their own fairness — you watched them land. A digital cast has to earn that trust differently, and the honest way to earn it is cryptography rather than reassurance. The Six Doors instrument uses a commit–reveal scheme: the platform commits to its randomness with a SHA-256 hash before you interact, your own taps contribute entropy to the result, and after the cast you can verify that nothing was steered. The full mechanism, including how to check a cast yourself, is explained in our article on provably fair digital divination. Digital casting is not a replacement for coins; it is an alternative with a different, and in one sense stronger, kind of transparency — plus a permanent journal of what you asked and when.

Try a first cast

The method above is the whole method — six throws, four sums, lines from the bottom up. If you have three coins in a drawer, try it tonight with a real question. And if you would like to see the same ritual with the topology of all sixty-four hexagrams laid out around your result, cast once at the Six Doors casting page: same coins, same sums, same lines — with every neighboring hexagram visible, and nothing asked of you but attention.