Saju draws me. The Yilin draws today.

The Jiaoshi Yilin was not in the original plan. The first idea was to show a saju chart as pictures in several painting styles, with an AI writing the reading afresh each time. But the writing lurched, in tone and in length, with the connection and the hour. In a world crowded with clever people, I had no confidence I could draw out sentences I would not be embarrassed by and keep them all of a piece. So I borrowed the authority of the Yilin, a book I had been reading on the side for fun. A hexagram calculator I had built for my own use, and a translation I had been picking at one line at a time with a machine translator and a search box, turned into a long march I had not planned.

It began as a shortcut

This is how I came to be reading that book on the side. Explanations by way of the five phases are everywhere. But to a student who did not know the deep system of thought behind them, they could look schematic or pedantic, and now and then I watched an interpreter grow drunk on their own words. To be honest, I was not after deep learning. I was tired of long, talkative commentaries and only wanted to check, quickly, whether a thing was good or bad — auspicious or ill (吉凶). I hoped a more clear-cut reading might exist somewhere. That was the shortcut, and it led me on to yin and yang and to the I Ching.

Along the way I learned of Heluo Lishu (河洛理數), a discipline that joins a saju chart to the I Ching. The trouble was that its criteria for judging the line statements were far too hard for a beginner. Then I met another method: cast a hexagram from the Fixed Number (大定數), and look up its place in the Jiaoshi Yilin, a book that sets out the relation between one hexagram and another as verses hinting at fortune. It leaned less on the interpreter's instinct, and the way a combination comes out is the same for everyone, so repeating it gives the same result. That it could be reproduced was what I trusted most. The calculation in this service follows Lee Bong-jo's study (2013), which sets that method out.

Why 4,096 and not 64

The Jiaoshi Yilin lets each of the 64 hexagrams change into each of the 64 again, and so holds 4,096 short oracle poems. With only 64, today's hexagram would be one of 64 and no more. With 4,096 it becomes a grid where "the place the Earth is passing today" (the base hexagram) meets "me, as seen within it" (the hexagram it changes into). The base hexagram is the same for everyone on a given day. The second is the one reached when a single one of its six lines moves, so even on the same day people divide six ways. Under the same sky, the verse each person is dealt still differs. If saju draws the "me" that does not change in a lifetime, the Yilin adds "today" to it.

How today's hexagram is set

Today's base hexagram is set by a scheme called jikil (直日). The year is cut into four quarters at the winter solstice, the spring equinox, the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, and from Zhongfu (中孚, the hexagram Inner Truth) just after the winter solstice, each hexagram stays about six days in turn. On each day a quarter turns, one hexagram stays for less than a day; sixty hexagrams and those four make sixty-four. Because the quarters differ slightly in length, the stay of one hexagram varies from 5.9 to 6.2 days. The Earth moves faster in the northern winter, when it is nearer the sun, and slower in summer, when it is farther — a difference a calendar does not show, and one that appears only when you work it out. That the number follows the rhythm of the heavens, and is not a coin tossed at will, is one reason I came to trust the scheme.

The translation was, in part, vanity

What started the translation was a single primer. The combinations were far more varied than the Tojeong Bigyeol I used to look at each New Year for fun, and once I knew what the verses meant, they looked splendid. The trouble was unfamiliar characters and thin background knowledge. So I began putting them into sentences I myself would not flinch at, and thought the effort might spare someone else the labour. At first I worked line by line with a machine translator and a search box; later I had an AI's help, translating in batches and then merging them into one. It took three months. I will not hide that it was also a journey of self-satisfaction, with vanity mixed in.

Along the way one rule settled. Even a poem classed as ill-omened (凶) is not put into words that frighten; it is put as "rest for now" or "wait." The very first of the 4,096, Qian (乾) going to Qian, was such a poem. Its reading says: do not force blocked words open; let them rest a while.

Oddly enough, a job begun because I only wanted to tell good from bad went on long enough to change my mind. A life is not simply good or bad; it can be good and bad at once, or the other way round. The thought came of itself. So "good or bad" passed through "good or not so good" and became "smooth going" or "sunlight through the rain." The names are my own whim. They are the words set beside a verse on the screen: "with the current," "sun through rain," "both at once."

The service keeps the poems translated this way as static files, so opening it every day calls no AI. I like that the best reason to come back is also the cheapest.

The question marks after its name

A few question marks hang on this book. By tradition its author is Jiao Yanshou (焦延壽) of the Han, but others have named Cui Zhuan (崔篆) or Xu Jun (許峻). One study reads it as a text compiled through many hands rather than one, and places an early version between the first century BCE and the first century CE.

There is one more. Among the 4,096, the same poem appears more than once. Counted in the source text this service uses, and treating poems identical to the character as one, there are 3,891 different poems. Group those that overlap phrase by phrase and the number falls further. 4,096 is the size of the structure; the number of different poems is smaller. And because the work was translated in batches, each judged by its context at the time, fifteen poems were left carrying different names in different places: with the current here, sun through rain or both at once there. It also means that many of these poems resist being called simply good or bad. That is why this service uses a poem not as "the answer" but only as a mirror held up to today.