Casting the Changes

The cast is not the answer. It is the instruction.

You own an I Ching translation. You can cast the coins and read the commentary — and then what? Most books stop at interpretation, leaving you with a hexagram you understand and nothing you can actually do with it.

Casting the Changes takes the cast the rest of the way. Kenneth Wu treats the hexagram, its changing lines and its trigrams as working instructions: turn lines into strokes, strokes into a fu talisman or sigil, the relating hexagram into timing, placement and rite — and Kan and Li, water and fire, into a sitting practice in your own body. Every one of the forty chapters carries a cast, a method or a practice from the first question to the completed working.

Inside youll discover

The three casts, kept distinct: slow yarrow stalks, the everyday three coins, and plum-blossom (Meihua Yishu) casting by number, image and time

Changing lines as instructions — and the relating hexagram as the map of where the work moves

Turning lines into strokes: from hexagram to sigil, step by step

Fu talismans in full: paper, ink, breath and seal, one hexagram fu drawn start to finish

Consecrating a talisman, timing a rite from the cast, and burning, carrying, placing or burying a fu

When the cast says no — refusal, delay and redirection — and casts for protection, clearing, work, relationships and travel, without overclaiming

Kan and Li reversed: the microcosmic circuit, a first internal-alchemy reading of hexagrams 29, 30, 63 and 64

Who this book is for

Readers who already own an I Ching and are frustrated that books stop at interpretation; practitioners of Taoism, qigong or Chinese folk magick who want craft attached to their casts; and experienced diviners from other systems looking for a casting method with physical work in it.

Kenneth Wu writes Taoist magick as a working craft, translating casting, talisman and internal-alchemy practice into plain, usable steps.

Cast it. Build it. Time it. Then let the changes change you.