An email arrives with three questions in it. Will the 485 come through. Should I take the offer at the smaller company. Also my mother keeps getting dizzy.
I write back: pick one.
One question per cast is structural in Liuyao, not fastidiousness on my part. A hexagram has six lines. Once dressed, each line carries an identity, and reading means singling out the one line that stands for what you asked. There is only ever one. Push three matters into a single hexagram and you are asking one line to represent a visa, a job and your mother’s head at the same time, at which point any reading at all can be made to fit.
The question has to be answerable
How the question is framed matters more than how the coins land.
How will my year go is not something Liuyao can hold. It was never built for a span of time; Bazi is. Liuyao is built for one matter, and the matter should come down to something like whether a thing happens, how fast, whether it is worth doing.
Someone asking how high to bid at Saturday’s auction has a real question, but three are stacked inside it: whether the property comes to them, whether it suits them once they live in it, and what the money does. Each is its own cast, and squeezing them together lands you back at the paragraph above.
Throwing the coins
Three coins, cupped in both hands, thrown six times.
The first throw is the bottom line of the hexagram. The next five build upward, and the sixth throw is the top line. A hexagram grows from the ground up, and reversing the order inverts the whole figure.
Each throw, look at how the three coins fell. The back of the coin counts yang, the inscribed face counts yin, and a two-to-one split goes with the majority. When all three match, that line is moving. Three backs is old yang, at its extreme and turning to yin; three faces is old yin, turning to yang. Moving lines produce a second hexagram, the changed one: the first reads the present state, the second where it is heading. A cast with no moving lines at all is common enough; then there is only the one hexagram to read.
Notations differ between lineages. Another goes by how many backs came up: one back is a plain yang line, two backs a yin line, three backs old yang, no backs old yin. The old yang and old yin land the same as above; it is the one-back and two-back throws that come out reversed. Which is older or more correct I have not settled, and I have no appetite for the argument. What matters is fixing one notation and never swapping. Swap once and none of your old cases line up any more.
The coins themselves do not matter much. Qing dynasty cash off eBay, a set of five-emperor coins, three identical Australian twenty-cent pieces, and nobody needs to bless them first. On Chinese cash the side with the reign inscription is the face and the plain side is the back. On the Australian coin the head is the side with lettering on it, so that is the face and the platypus is the back.
Dressing the hexagram
Six yin and yang lines on their own are not yet anything you can read. The information has to be hung onto them.
This step is called dressing the hexagram, and several things happen in it. The figure is assigned to one of the eight palaces, Qian, Dui, Li, Zhen, Xun, Kan, Gen, Kun, which fixes the elemental character of the whole cast. Each line then receives a heavenly stem and an earthly branch, and the branch carries one of the five phases. From those phases the six relatives are derived, using the palace as self: what generates self is the parent line, what self generates is the offspring line, what controls self is the officer line, what self controls is the wealth line, what matches self is the sibling line. Five categories, though the name says six: the sixth is self. The six spirits go on next, the green dragon, the vermilion bird, Gouchen, Tengshe, the white tiger and the dark warrior, starting from a position set by the heavenly stem of the day and running upward from the bottom line. Last come the subject and object lines. The subject line is you, the one asking; the object line is the other party. Their positions are fixed by where the hexagram sits in its palace sequence, not chosen.
The labels mislead, in Chinese as much as in translation. The parent line has nothing to do with your parents. The officer line is not a person in an office. Read them literally and you will misread every chart you touch.
One more thing goes on the page: the month and the day of the cast. The month sets strength, and the day can feed, attack, clash or bind. They are the background the whole reading happens against. The same six lines thrown in a different month can read completely differently.
The month there is the branch month, not the one on your phone. Early August tips into shen, which the tables count as autumn, however cold Sydney is. Stems and branches do not turn over at the equator. Siting a house does.
Charting software handles all of this competently and I use it. The step it cannot take for you is the next one.
Choosing the useful spirit
The useful spirit is the line standing for what you asked. You take whichever relative matches the subject.
The parent line covers whatever shelters or certifies: property, a contract, a degree, the visa grant itself, elders too. The officer line covers a position, an authority, a legal matter, anything coming after you, and a husband when a woman asks. Illness sits there too in the classical tables, as a category and nothing more; I do not read for illness, and the refusals are listed at the end. The offspring line covers children, juniors and the lifting of trouble.
The three things I get asked most out here each take it differently. A visa is the odd one, because it is both a document and an authority sitting across the table, so I read both: the parent line for the grant itself, the officer line for the department, and how the subject line stands with each. A job offer runs off the officer line as the position against the subject line as you. A house purchase puts the parent line on the property, the wealth line on the money and the object line on the vendor. Money and goods sit on the wealth line, as does a wife or girlfriend when a man asks. Whoever bids against you that morning is the sibling line, along with partners, peers, competitors and money going out the door.
Get the useful spirit wrong and everything downstream is wasted, which is where most unreliable readings go astray, well before the chart, and no software will flag it, because as far as it is concerned nothing has gone wrong.
What the reading weighs
Once the useful spirit is fixed, you weigh its situation.
Its strength against the month first, whether the season feeds it or drains it, which decides how much force it has. Then the day, which is the live one, able to generate, control, clash or bind it directly. Then whether it is moving or still, since a moving line acts on other lines while a still line only receives. If it is moving, what it changes into matters too: the changed line turns back on it, and the attacking case is the one to watch. On top of all that, whether it has fallen into a void period, whether the month has broken it, whether it is absent from the hexagram altogether and hiding beneath another line. These layers stack rather than queue.
Timing is where I am weakest. Whether a thing resolves, and how rough the road is, comes through more solidly than timing, though even that is only how it stands at the hour you threw. When it resolves is another matter. There are rules, built on clash, on binding, on the day the useful spirit comes round. Practitioners who will name an exact date exist. I give a window.
A cast reads a state
What comes out of a hexagram is how the matter stands at the moment you threw the coins. A state has strength and direction, and it is not a sentence handed down.
A useful spirit under attack is usually telling you which side of the thing is loose and where the work is, not that you should give up on it. A well-fed one does not mean the thing completes itself while you wait.
So I tend to close a reading with a caveat: this is on today’s conditions. Raise your ceiling by three hundred thousand next week and it is a different matter, cast again.