I Ching Daily Trigram
Your I Ching trigram for today, drawn from your birth date and today’s date.
Draws one of the eight I Ching trigrams from your birth date and today’s date to read today’s flow and advice. It refreshes at midnight each day. The eight trigrams are the eight shapes made by stacking three lines of yin or yang, standing for heaven, lake, fire, thunder, wind, water, mountain and earth. The Book of Changes pairs them to unfold sixty-four hexagrams, but since this reading looks at the grain of a single day it stops at the eight. Its scope is therefore different from divination worked with the full sixty-four.
How it works
Enter your birth date once; the draw is seeded with today’s date as well. The same day always gives the same trigram, and it turns over at midnight.
What you'll get
The one of the eight trigrams drawn for today is shown as its natural image — heaven, marsh, fire, thunder, wind, water, mountain, earth. It turns over to a new one past midnight, so setting it beside yesterday's lets you read the flow. It does not stop at what the trigram means: today's ties, work, money and health, what to watch for and one piece of advice read the same trigram from six angles.
Read the trigram as a scene in nature
Calling the scene to mind reads far better than memorising what each trigram is defined to mean. Thunder is what sounds suddenly, mountain is what stands still, wind is what seeps in. If today trigram is mountain, take it as a day whose grain favours holding your place rather than stepping out, and you will have read it correctly without learning a single definition.
A trick for learning the eight
A trigram is three short lines, each either yin or yang, stacked up, which is why there are only eight. Fix the two ends first, all three yang is heaven and all three yin is earth, and the six that remain find their places in between without much effort. The symbol shown with your result draws those very lines, so once the shapes are familiar they come to mind faster than the names ever will.
How to lay the trigram over your day
One trigram cannot account for a whole day. Read the trigram and its single line of advice in the morning, and recall that line at the moment you have to decide something. If it said to step forward and the situation says otherwise, follow the situation. This reading is not trying to direct your day; it hands you one more angle to check before you judge, which is about as much as a single trigram can honestly offer.
When the same trigram runs several days
Because your birth date and the date are used together as the seed, the same trigram can fall several days running by chance. It carries no special meaning, but it does make a fine excuse to ask whether you have been putting off whatever it points at. Conversely, a different trigram every day does not make each day wildly different. The trigram is only a marker for the grain of the day, so there is no need to mind whether it changes.
If you want to go further into the I Ching
What you see here goes as far as the eight trigrams; the Book of Changes stacks them in pairs to make sixty-four. Once the natural images of the eight sit comfortably, the sixty-four begin to read as their combinations, so learning the eight first is the easier order. Do note that this daily grain reading and a proper consultation with sixty-four hexagrams are used for quite different things, and treating them as the same will only confuse both.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the trigram change if I check several times a day?
No. Your birth date and the day seed one trigram for the whole day, and it turns over after midnight.
Is this the same as the 64 hexagrams?
Here the day is read through the eight trigrams. It is a lighter daily reading with a different scope from a full 64-hexagram consultation.
Why does drawing a trigram need my birth date?
Your birth date and the day's date together form the seed, so that different people get different trigrams on the same day. Without the birth date, every visitor would receive the same one.
I drew an unfavorable trigram — what now?
Good and bad are not fixed in the eight trigrams. Each one simply says which way the day's energy leans, so a cautionary trigram is best read as telling you what to watch for.
Should I use the solar or the lunar date?
There is no fixed answer. The seed that picks the trigram is your birth date together with today's date, so switching calendars gives a different trigram. Rather than one being correct, keep to whichever you chose first — that is what lets you compare yesterday with today on the same footing.