KREF · 20.08 · Reflection · essay · September 23, 2026

Fifty Stalks

The I Ching, the turning, and a book written before you asked.

When we were living in San Francisco I studied Traditional Chinese Medicine for about a year: the meridians, the pulses, the five phases and their two cycles. Somewhere in that year a dear friend gave me a copy of the I Ching. I read the introduction, learned how to consult it, and did now and then, the way you might open a very old door to see what was behind it. I took it as a curiosity. What caught me was the project behind it: people three thousand years ago sitting down to write out how change happens, every kind of it, in sixty-four figures, and then trusting the catalog enough to ask it what comes next. The book assumes change has a shape you can learn. Learn the shape and you can see a little way ahead. It was nearly a deterministic idea. The word came to me years later. Then the dot-com crash rearranged the year, and the book went on a shelf.

It came down again last week. I have been describing the turning as tarot-adjacent, because it is a deck and you draw from it, and that is the shape people recognize. But the more I work on it the less tarot it is. Tarot hands the reader seventy-eight images and leaves the meaning to the table. The turning has a book: seventy pages, one for every draw, written before anyone asks. That is the I Ching's design, and the deck is at best a hybrid, cards on the outside and the Book of Changes underneath. So I wanted to go back into the history and see what I had borrowed, and what I had changed without noticing.

Before the book

The Shang court, around 1200 BCE, asked its questions of fire. A diviner carved hollows into a turtle shell or an ox's shoulder blade, pressed a hot point in, and read the crack. Then he scratched the question into the bone, and sometimes what came of it. Those scratches are the oldest Chinese writing there is. Every answer in that system was new, made on the spot by heat and read on the spot by a specialist.

The Zhou replaced the fire with a book. The Zhou yi, which became the I Ching, took shape around 900 BCE: sixty-four figures, each six lines tall, each line solid or broken, and for every figure a name, a judgment, and a short text per line. All of it written in advance. The diviner's job changed from reading a crack to finding a page. Later the commentaries piled on, the Ten Wings, credited to Confucius and written by many hands over centuries, and the diviner's manual became the philosophy book most of us meet.

Each hexagram is two trigrams stacked, and there are eight trigrams: heaven, earth, thunder, water, mountain, wind, fire, lake. Eight over eight is sixty-four. Hold onto that grid.

How the stalks count

The stalk method is in the Great Commentary, one of the Wings. Fifty dried yarrow stalks. One is set aside and sits out for the whole reading. The other forty-nine are split into two heaps by hand, counted off in fours, and the remainders kept; do that three times and what is left tells you one line, solid or broken, resting or about to change. Six lines make a hexagram, so a full reading is eighteen rounds of splitting and counting, built from the bottom up. It takes about half an hour.

So the stalks are counters. The lines are what the counting makes. The canon's cover page used to say "the coins only choose the page," and I have fixed it, because the coins are a shortcut about a thousand years old. For the two thousand years before that, this was the method.

And the counting has a lean. Work the arithmetic and a solid line comes up on the move three times as often as a broken one. Solid and broken are even overall, but the solid line is more likely to be on its way somewhere. In the stalk book, the firm changes more readily than the yielding.

Three coins give the same lines in a quarter of the time, and they give them evenly: either kind is as likely to be moving as the other. The coins made the book fast and made it symmetrical, and the old lean went out with the stalks. The book's whole subject is how change moves, and the switch to coins changed how change moves inside it. It happened quietly enough that people throwing coins at a kitchen table a thousand years later assume it was always this way.

Changes

The moving lines are the book's whole trick. If your reading has any, you read the hexagram you drew, then the texts for the lines that are moving, then you flip those lines and read the hexagram they turn into. A reading is a present figure and the figure it is becoming. No moving lines, one page. Six moving lines, two whole hexagrams and everything between.

One detour, for the people who read the thesis. In 1701 a Jesuit in Beijing named Bouvet sent Leibniz the sixty-four hexagrams in the order the Song philosopher Shao Yong had laid them in. Leibniz was working on binary arithmetic. Read solid as one and broken as zero, and Shao Yong's sequence counts from zero to sixty-three. Leibniz put the hexagrams in his 1703 paper. The page numbers of the oldest book of answers are six-bit words.

What the turning took

The book. The turning draws one of ten motions and one of seven forces, and their meeting is one of seventy pages, each written before anyone asked: a short answer, a discussion, and a last line in plain terms. The draw picks a page. The writing was done long before. That is the same move the Zhou made when they put the fire out and wrote a book: the answers exist before the question does.

The grid. Ten chapters, one per motion, each met by the seven forces in the same order. Trigram over trigram with different axes. Any page can be looked up directly.

The other Chinese system. The five motions are the five phases of wu xing, which the Han braided together with the I Ching and which I had been drawing on a whiteboard in class: water, wood, fire, earth, metal, each governing a pair of organs, a season, a color, a taste. The turning names them for what they do, flowing, branching, radiating, centering, condensing, and keeps both cycles as the medicine has them. Every pair either feeds or checks. That part is two thousand years old and I kept it whole.

Where they part

Two alphabets. A hexagram is two draws from the same eight trigrams, so heaven can sit over heaven. The turning draws from two separate pools: a motion, which names a relationship between two phases, and a force, which names an event acting on everything at once: something new arrives, an edge forms, the balance tips. The page is where the relationship meets the event.

Flat odds. Every one of the seventy pages comes up one time in seventy. The stalks leaned toward change in firm things; the coins leaned toward symmetry; the turning lies flat, which is right for a deck that treats the draw as a page number.

No moving lines. The turning had them once, in all but name. Every card had a moving face and a held face, and which end landed up changed the reading. I retired that in August. A card says one thing whichever way it lands, and the change lives in the orrery instead, ten motions and seven forces turning past each other, every meeting already on a page. The I Ching's reading carries its own future inside it. The turning's holds still.

The voice. The I Ching advises. Its judgments deal in good fortune and misfortune, in what furthers and what brings remorse; "it furthers one to cross the great water" runs through the old translation like a refrain. The turning's pages hold to a different rule. A page names what is true of its conjunction and stops there. Prediction, instruction, and interpretation are left to you. Even the plain-terms line at the bottom, the one the draw shows you, is a statement.

Where the meaning is. Jung wrote the foreword to the 1950 English edition of the I Ching, the Wilhelm translation most of us own, and his explanation is the one the West inherited: synchronicity, the fall of the stalks sharing a quality with everything else in that moment, the question included. The meaning is in the coincidence. The turning stands on the other side of that line, on Maturana. The I Ching had already decided that change has a shape and the shape can be written down. Maturana moves that shape out of the world and into the system. The world can only knock. The system is what changes, and how it changes is decided by how it is built, so the shape of the change was in the system before the knock arrived. The page is the same for everyone who turns it. What it means for you, holding your question, today, is made in you. The signal knocks. The structure answers.

On that account the stalks, the coins, and the shuffle all have the same job. They pick a page, and any page will do. The reader does the rest.

The fiftieth stalk

Which leaves the one thing the turning gave up by going fast. Eighteen rounds of dividing a bundle of dried plants is half an hour of the hands being busy while the question sits in the mind. The stalk method is a meditation with a random number generator attached. By the time the page is found you have been alone with your question longer than most people ever are.

The turning's draw is a tap. What it kept is the order of things. Before a card turns, the deck asks what you are holding. You answer first, then it draws. The tradition tells several stories about the one stalk that sits apart. In the turning, the thing that sits apart is what you brought: the situation you were holding when you tapped. The cards turn and the page is found. The situation was yours before the cards turned, and it is still yours after.