The Origin of Liu Yao · A Compressed History of Divination

The Zhouyi (Book of Changes) began as a divination manual. "The number of the Great Expansion is fifty, of which forty-nine are used" — fifty yarrow stalks, divided, suspended, counted in fours, and set aside; three operations form one line, eighteen form a hexagram. A full casting took tens of minutes. Slow, but solemn.

The 64 hexagrams and 384 lines established in this era became the framework for every later form of Yi divination, Liu Yao included.

Jing Fang (77–37 BC), a student of Jiao Yanshou, is the true "father of Liu Yao theory". He wove the heavenly stems, earthly branches, and Five Phases into the trigrams, creating the Eight Palaces, najia, and Shi–Ying positions, and defined the Six Relatives: Parents, Siblings, Descendants, Wealth, and Officials.

From then on every line carried Five-Phase and relational attributes. Reading a hexagram shifted from looking up the text to weighing the strength and interactions of each line — the fundamental step that set Liu Yao apart from text-based Zhouyi divination.

Yarrow stalks were scarce and the procedure cumbersome. Around the Tang–Song transition, folk practitioners replaced them with three cash coins, thrown six times to build a hexagram. Attributed to the monk Mayi and recorded in the Huozhulin, the method bears the book's name.

Swapping stalks for coins compressed casting from tens of minutes to one, and Liu Yao left the scholar's study to become the most widely practiced folk divination method. Today's coin casting descends directly from it.

Zengshan Buyi (by Yehe Laoren) pruned old doctrines against a large body of real casts, while Buzhen Zhengzong (by Wang Hongxu) systematically organized the rules of Useful God, strength, motion, and the interactions of lines. Today's Liu Yao textbooks still follow the Ming–Qing framework.

Through the 20th century Liu Yao spread wherever Chinese communities settled, and the cash coin gave way to any three coins at hand — what matters was never the coin, but "three coins, six throws, one focused question".

This site takes the next step: a deterministic plotting engine handles stems-branches, najia, Six Relatives, Six Spirits, and moving lines, while the AI turns those interactions into plain language. Same cast, same reading — no randomness added.