Les 64 hexagrammes de l’I Ching

Les soixante-quatre figures du Livre des mutations dans l’ordre traditionnel du roi Wen. Chaque notice donne la structure de la figure — numéro, trigrammes, disposition des traits — la sentence dans sa langue d’origine et une lecture en français.

Les soixante-quatre, dans l’ordre du roi Wen

What the sixty-four hexagrams are

The eight trigrams — Qian, Dui, Li, Zhen, Xun, Kan, Gen and Kun — are stacked in pairs, one above the other. That gives 8x8 = 64 figures, each built from six lines read from the bottom upwards. These are the hexagrams, and they form the body of the I Ching.

Every hexagram carries a name and a statement, and each of its six lines carries a line text. Together with the two extra texts attached to hexagrams 1 and 2, that is the whole of the classic.

The King Wen sequence

The traditional order runs from Qian and Kun to Ji Ji and Wei Ji. Hexagrams mostly come in pairs: usually the second is the first turned upside down, and where a figure is unchanged by that inversion it is paired instead with the hexagram whose lines are all reversed.

The numbering used throughout this site is that sequence, so hexagram 23 here is hexagram 23 in any standard edition.

Reading the trigrams

The lower three lines form the inner trigram, the upper three the outer. Chinese hexagram names often name both, outer first: Shui Lei Zhun is Kan (water) over Zhen (thunder).

Line positions are counted upwards and named for their type: a yang line in the bottom position is the "nine at the beginning", a yin line in the top position the "six at the top".

Statement, line texts and commentary

The statement judges the hexagram as a whole; the line texts judge particular situations within it. Both belong to the oldest layer of the text.

The Tuan and Xiang commentaries came later and explain the statement, the image and each line in turn. This site keeps the classic and its commentaries in separate sections rather than blending them.

A note on what is translated here

The structural facts on these pages — sequence number, trigrams, line pattern, related hexagrams — carry across languages unchanged. The statements are given in the original Chinese.

The classical Chinese commentaries have not been translated, and machine translations of them are deliberately not published here. The English readings on each page were written for this site, not translated from the Chinese entries.