Taixuanjing

The Taixuanjing is a divination guide written by the Confucian author Yang Xiong (53 BCE–18 CE) in the decade before the fall of the Western Han dynasty. According to the sources, a first draft was completed in 2 BCE. During the Jin dynasty, an otherwise unknown person named Fan Wang salvaged the text and wrote a commentary on it, and it is from that commentary that the work survives today.

The text is modeled on and inspired by the I Ching, but it is built on 81 ternary tetragrams, characters made of four lines that may be unbroken, broken once, or broken twice, instead of the 64 binary hexagrams of the I Ching. It can be consulted as an oracle by casting yarrow stalks or a six-faced die; the numbers obtained define the lines of a tetragram, which is then looked up in the text. The symbols can be read numerically from 0 to 80, which appears deliberate, since chapter 8 sets out the principle of place value. Michael Nylan published an English translation in 1993.