Chinese cultural term · reviewed 2026-10-21
易经
Book of Changes
Yì Jīng · Classic of Changes
An ancient Chinese classic centered on change, pattern, and symbolic hexagrams.
A familiar bridge
Start from something known.
A classic text and symbolic system that can be approached like a historical literary work, a philosophical source, or a divination tradition.
Worked example
See the term in position.
The text’s sixty-four six-line figures are commonly called hexagrams in English.
Cultural context
What surrounds the word.
It can be read as a divination text, a philosophical text, or a historical and literary object. Those are different approaches.
Boundary
What it does not mean.
It is not a single fixed fortune-telling algorithm, and translations differ substantially.
Inside the portrait
How this term appears here.
Sky Atlas uses the text as a cultural and hexagram reference; the current portrait does not cast a hexagram.