Sun Tzu and Lao Tzu

The oldest and best known book of Chinese wisdom was composed primarily during the late second and early first millennium BCE, with later additions of mostly Confucian but some Taoist ideas. Primarily used for casting oracles, the I Ching is believed by many Taoist adepts to be a guide to the secrets of the “celestial mechanism,” a tool for understanding and living in harmony with the flow of events in the universe. It is based on the opposing principles of light and dark, later referred to as yin and yang, whose interaction yields change. The Ching is made up of different arrangements of broken (- -) and unbroken (–) lines, which represent yin and yang, respectively. The lines are arranged in 8 groups of three lines, called trigrams, each of which has specific associations: heaven, earth, fire, water, thunder, mountain, lake, wind. The trigrams are combined into 64 different pairs of six lines each called hexagrams, originally obtained by throwing 50 yarrow stalks, later simplified to 3 coins.