You are welcome to The I Ching!
I am glad you to welcome on a site, devoted to a great monument of the Chinese culture "Canon of Changes" (more known as "Book of Changes", "I Ching") and to the online divinations based on it.
What is I Ching?
The I Ching or "Yì Jīng", also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest
of the Chinese classic texts. The book contains a divination system comparable to Western geomancy or the West African Ifá system; in Western
cultures and modern East Asia, it is still widely used for this purpose.

In China the I Ching had two distinct functions. The first was as a compendium and classic of ancient cosmic principles.
The second function was that of divination text. As a divination text the world of the I Ching was that of the marketplace fortune teller and roadside oracle.
These individuals served the illiterate peasantry. The educated Confucian elite in China were of an entirely different disposition. The future results of our actions
were a function of our personal virtues. The Confucian literati actually had little use for the I Ching as a work of divination.
In the collected works of the countless educated literati of ancient China there are actually few references to the I Ching as a divination text.
Any eyewitness account of traditional Chinese society, such as S. Wells Williams
The Middle Kingdom, and many others, can clarify this very basic distinction. Williams tells us of the I Ching:
The hundreds of fortune- tellers seen in the streets of Chinese towns, whose answers to their perplexed customers are more or less founded on these cabala,
indicate their influence among the illiterate; while among scholars, who have long since conceded all divination to be vain..
(The Middle Kingdom, vol. 1, p. 632)
Good luck in all your endeavors
God bless you!!! |