Liu Yao

Liu Yao is a rule-based Chinese hexagram method centered on a specific question. It uses the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yi Jing, assigns a Heavenly Stem, Earthly Branch, element and family role to each of the six lines, then reads the host–guest positions, focal line and moving lines to assess the matter's present conditions, changes and likely outcome.

The names tell you the method

A hexagram has six lines, and each line is a yao. Hence Liu Yao, "six lines".

Its more precise name is Na Jia divination. Na Jia means assigning stems and branches to every line, and that step is what separates this method from every other hexagram system. Plum Blossom uses the same sixty-four hexagrams but, once the hexagram is up, looks only at the two trigrams and their images. Liu Yao instead lays out stems, branches, elements, family roles, self-and-other markings and spirits across all six lines, and finds the answer inside that mesh.

The third name, Wen Wang Gua, attributes it to King Wen. All three refer to the same practice.

Casting: three coins, six tosses

Which face is which: the inscribed face is yin; the blank or patterned reverse is yang. On a modern coin, the emblem side is yang.

Toss all three together and count the blank faces:

Toss six times, building the hexagram from the bottom up: the first toss gives the first (lowest) line, the sixth gives the top line.

Old yang and old yin are the moving lines — they change into their opposites, producing a second, changed hexagram. Young lines stay as they are. The mnemonic is: old changes, young does not.

The Zeng Shan Bu Yi's chapter on casting gives these four results most clearly, and other accounts match it; there is no disagreement here.

Building the chart

The raw hexagram is only a blank; each of the following steps adds a layer.

1. Na Jia — stems and branches for each line

The basis is the Na Jia verse (also called Hun Tian Jia Zi). It gives, for each of the eight trigrams, the starting stem and branch of the inner and the outer position; the remaining lines follow at intervals — yang trigrams (Qian, Zhen, Kan, Gen) running forward, yin trigrams (Kun, Xun, Li, Dui) running back, always built from the bottom up.

There is a property you can check the table against: the outer branches of any trigram are always the clash-opposites of its inner branches. Qian's inner run is Zi, Yin, Chen and its outer run is Wu, Shen, Xu — Zi clashes Wu, Yin clashes Shen, Chen clashes Xu. This holds for all eight without exception.

2. The six relatives — the palace element is "self"

The sixty-four hexagrams belong to eight palaces (Qian, Kan, Gen, Zhen, Xun, Li, Kun, Dui), each with its own element. Taking that element as "self", every line's element falls into one of five relations:

For example, Earth over Heaven belongs to the Kun palace, whose element is Earth. Its first line is Jia Zi, water; earth controls water, and what I control is Wealth — so the first line is "Wealth, Zi water".

3. Self and other

The self line stands for the querent or their own position; the other line stands for the counterparty, the environment, or the object itself.

The self line's position is fixed by the hexagram's generation index within its palace: the palace's founding hexagram has self on the top line, a first-generation hexagram on the first line, and so on upward; a wandering-soul hexagram has self on the fourth line, a returning-soul hexagram on the third. The other line is always three positions away from the self line.

4. The six spirits, started from the day stem

The spirits run Azure Dragon → Vermilion Bird → Hooked Array → Rising Snake → White Tiger → Black Tortoise, placed from the first line upward. Where the sequence starts depends on the day stem: Jia and Yi start at the Azure Dragon, Bing and Ding at the Vermilion Bird, Wu at the Hooked Array, Ji at the Rising Snake, Geng and Xin at the White Tiger, Ren and Gui at the Black Tortoise.

Note that Wu and Ji start differently — unlike the other four pairs.

5. Hidden lines

Six lines cannot hold all five relatives, so some relative is usually absent. When that happens you fetch it from the corresponding line of the palace's founding hexagram; that line is the hidden line, said to lie beneath the line occupying the same position in your hexagram (the flying line).

The Zengshan Bu Yi puts it plainly: seek it in the palace's founding hexagram, because the founding hexagram holds all six relatives. That premise checks out — all eight founding hexagrams do carry all five relatives, without exception.

The answering line: get this wrong and everything after is wrong

The answering line is whichever line stands for the matter you asked about. The Zengshan Bu Yi defines it as the family-role marker in the hexagram for the thing being asked.

Which relative to take depends on the question. The table below lists only entries found in both the Bushi Zhengzong and the Zengshan Bu Yi:

There is also a rule about self and other (Bushi Zhengzong, second of the Eighteen Discussions): for matters of your own gain or loss, take the self line; for matters concerning others, take the other line.

The classics contradict themselves too. The Zengshan Bu Yi lists brothers-in-law under Sibling, then immediately writes that in practice it takes the self line for them and has repeatedly found this to hold. The author's own experience overturns his own classification. We record such disagreements rather than settle them.

The state of a line

Once the chart is built, a few more states follow directly from the day and month. They are plain facts, carrying no verdict of their own:

• Void: the sixty-day cycle runs in six ten-day sets; ten stems paired with twelve branches always leave two branches over, and those two are void for that set. The Jia Zi set voids Xu and Hai, Jia Xu voids Shen and You, Jia Shen voids Wu and Wei, Jia Wu voids Chen and Si, Jia Chen voids Yin and Mao, Jia Yin voids Zi and Chou.
• Month-break: the branch clashed by the month is broken. Note the month here is the solar-term month, not the lunar month — Yin after Start of Spring, Mao after Awakening of Insects, and so on.
• Day-clash: a still line clashed by the day branch.
• Advancing / retreating: a moving line changing into a line of the same element, moving forward through the branches (Hai to Zi, Yin to Mao, Si to Wu, Shen to You, Chou to Chen, Chen to Wei, Wei to Xu, Xu to Chou) advances; going back retreats.
• Stagnation: a moving line whose changed branch is identical to its own. This arises because Qian and Zhen take exactly the same branches, so swapping one for the other leaves every branch untouched.
• Fan Yin: there are two kinds. The Bushi Zhengzong says so outright: "Fan Yin is of two sorts — Fan Yin of the hexagram, and Fan Yin of the lines." Hexagram Fan Yin is opposition by later-heaven trigram position, the inner or outer trigram swapping across Qian↔Xun, Kan↔Li, Gen↔Kun or Zhen↔Dui. Line Fan Yin is every branch clashing, and of all the pairings the eight trigrams admit, only Kun↔Xun clashes in all six positions. The Zengshan Bu Yi's example, Sheng changing to Guan, is Xun↔Kun, and belongs to the second kind.
• Entering the tomb: Chen is the tomb of Water and Earth, Wei of Wood, Xu of Fire, Chou of Metal. A line meeting its tomb in the day or month enters the tomb; a moving line changing into its own tomb is said to change into the tomb. Whether that is in itself unfavourable is disputed — see below.
• Clash-type and harmony-type hexagrams: when all three paired positions (1 with 4, 2 with 5, 3 with 6) clash, the hexagram is clash-type — ten of them; when all three harmonise, it is harmony-type — eight of them. The commonly repeated figure of six omits two.

How strong is a line

The same Officer line carries quite different weight in the first month and in the seventh. To judge strength, look first at the month, then at the day.

The month sets the baseline: measured against the element of the month branch, the same element thrives, what it generates is next in line, and the rest are in decline. The Bushi Zhengzong lays this out by season, the Zengshan Bu Yi month by month; they agree throughout.

But the Zengshan Bu Yi immediately adds something important:

A line should be strong — but strength is not fixed by season alone. A line sitting on the day or the month, or generated by the day, the month, a moving line or a changed line, or meeting its Growth or Prime position, is likewise called strong.

In other words, decline by month does not mean the line is weak. Sitting on the day branch, or being generated by the day, month, a moving line or a changed line, makes it strong all the same. Counting months alone is not enough — which is why the column on our chart is headed "Month · Day & Month" rather than "Strength". It reports the line's situation, not a verdict.

Void, break and clash

Void is not one thing. It divides into void-but-usable and void-to-the-bottom.

A line that is thriving, or moving, or changing into void, or hidden yet thriving, or generated by the day branch or a moving line, is void but usable — merely not yet in season. Once the ten-day set runs out, or its day comes round, or something clashes it into substance or fills it, it works again. A line that is in decline, still, and generated by nothing at all is void to the bottom.

Month-break is blunter: broken or not, with nothing in between.

A clash from the day depends on what the line already was. Clash a thriving still line and you get hidden movement — nothing visible has happened, but it is already at work. Clash one in decline and you get a day-break: it simply scatters. The Zengshan Bu Yi: "clashing a thriving still line is hidden movement; clashing a weak one makes a day-break." The Yilin Buyi puts it more plainly still: "thriving, a clash sets it going; in decline, a clash scatters it."

Clash-type and harmony-type hexagrams have to be read against what you asked. The same clash-type hexagram is good news for illness and bad news for money — it cannot be read uniformly.

Timing: when does it happen

Asking Liu Yao "when" is not looking something up in a table. It is asking what would break the current blockage.

A line bound in harmony waits for the branch that clashes it apart; a void line waits for the branch that fills it; a month-broken line waits for the one that makes it substantial. So the answer takes the form of a branch — Shen, You, Hai.

Going on from "Shen would release it" to an actual year, month and day is another matter: the classics each have their own approach and they do not agree, and we would rather not manufacture one for them.

Where the schools disagree

The books largely agree on how a chart is built. On how to read it they diverge sharply — the Bushi Zhengzong devotes five chapters to refuting the Zengshan Bu Yi. On the following there is still no settled answer, and we would rather tell you where the disagreement lies than adjudicate between them:

• A line that is void, moving and month-broken all at once. The Bushi Zhengzong calls it truly void; the Zengshan Bu Yi says both "moving is not void" and "month-broken is void"; the Yilin Buyi says "if it also meets a month-break, moving avails it nothing". Three books, three positions.
• What a hidden line portends. The flying line controlling the hidden one, the hidden generating the flying — every book has the terms. But the verse that assigns them good or ill fortune is word-for-word identical in all three, which makes it one passage copied onward rather than three books agreeing.
• Which line to take when the same relative appears twice. The older method has a rule; the Zengshan Bu Yi explicitly overturns it on the evidence of its own case readings. The two positions are directly opposed.
• Whether entering the tomb is bad. The tomb itself is easy to spot, but "entering the tomb means being trapped" is a later inference; the old books do not say it outright.
• Clash and harmony down at the level of one line — being roused by harmony, bound in harmony, generated through change. Clear enough at the level of the hexagram; once you get down to a single line, every book goes its own way.
• How strength is weighed up. Month, day and moving lines all contribute, but no book says which counts for more.
• The detail of the topic chapters — money, illness, lost property. Each book has its own system, and they differ widely.

Our approach is to set out what each school says, rather than force an answer that is not there.

How it divides labour

Liu Yao and Plum Blossom are both hexagram methods, built on the same sixty-four figures, but they pull in opposite directions: Liu Yao is the full apparatus, dense with rules and highly derivable; Plum Blossom is the quick answer, minimal to cast and weighted toward image over technique.

Sources

Liu Yao is attributed to King Wen but took shape with Jing Fang's Na Jia studies in the Han. Among transmitted texts, Liu Ji's Huang Jin Ce (Ming) is the source of the general maxims; Wang Hongxu's Bushi Zhengzong (Qing) was built on it and devotes five chapters to refuting the contemporaneous Zengshan Bu Yi; Ye He Lao Ren's Zengshan Bu Yi (Qing) favours verification and records many case readings.

Because those two Qing works argue with each other, the places where they agree are the places most worth trusting — and on the construction of a chart they agree almost throughout.

That said, the Bushi Zhengzong is built on the Huang Jin Ce and the Zengshan Bu Yi quotes it heavily, so both draw on the same stream. Genuinely outside it stands Zhang Shibao's Yilin Buyi (Ming), which often supplies a third view where the other two cannot be reconciled.

A common bibliographic confusion. The "Zhang Xingyuan general judgement" collected in the Yi Yin looks like another voice, but compared line by line it is the general-judgement verse of the Yilin Buyi with Zhang Shibao's commentary stripped away. It is the same text, not a second school.

A note

Liu Yao belongs to traditional culture and decision-making reference. It does not constitute medical, legal, financial or any other professional advice. A hexagram is for clarifying your own thinking, not for making the decision on your behalf.

Cast one at Guanyitang

The Liu Yao caster supports tossing three coins, entering a hexagram cast elsewhere, and drawing one with cryptographic randomness (distribution identical to three coins). The chart is built in full — stems and branches, family roles, self and other, the six spirits, hidden lines, advancing and retreating, stagnation and Fan Yin. Each line also shows where it stands with the month, what the day and month do to it, whether it is void or broken, whether it is in hidden movement, and which branch would release it. Every rule cites its classical source.

FAQ

How is Liu Yao different from BaZi or Zi Wei?

They answer different questions. BaZi and Zi Wei are cast from your birth moment — one chart for a lifetime, answering who you are and what you are made of. Liu Yao is cast from the moment you throw the coins — one chart per matter, answering whether this particular thing will come off. A BaZi chart is drawn once; a Liu Yao chart can be drawn daily, as long as the question is new. Used seriously, the birth chart tells you about yourself and the cast hexagram handles specific problems.

Why the names Liu Yao, Na Jia divination and Wen Wang Gua?

A hexagram has six lines; each line is a yao, hence Liu Yao — six lines. Na Jia refers to assigning a Heavenly Stem and Earthly Branch to every line, which is the step that distinguishes this method from other hexagram systems, hence Na Jia divination. Wen Wang Gua attributes the method to King Wen, signalling that it works on the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yi Jing. All three names refer to the same practice.

Which side of the coin is which?

The inscribed face is yin; the blank or patterned reverse is yang. Toss all three together: one blank and two inscribed is Single, a young yang line; two blanks and one inscribed is Split, a young yin line; three blanks is Double, an old yang line; three inscribed is Crossed, an old yin line. Old lines are the moving ones and change into their opposite; young lines stay put — the mnemonic is old changes, young does not. This reading follows the Zeng Shan Bu Yi and is corroborated by an independent second source.

Why do you refuse to judge some things?

Because on those points Liu Yao itself has no settled answer. Its interpretive rules are scattered across the Bushi Zhengzong, the Zengshan Bu Yi, the Huang Jin Ce, the Yilin Buyi and others, and the schools disagree — the Bushi Zhengzong devotes five chapters to refuting the Zengshan Bu Yi. Where that happens, we would rather show you where the disagreement lies than pick one school and sound certain. A line that is at once void, moving and month-broken, for instance, is placed differently by all three books; handing you a confident verdict there would be the irresponsible answer.

References

• Wang Hongxu, Bushi Zhengzong (Qing) — the classification of answering lines, the Eighteen Discussions, the hidden-line tables
• Ye He Lao Ren, Zengshan Bu Yi (Qing) — chapters on casting, void, month-break, hidden lines and advancing/retreating
• Liu Ji, Huang Jin Ce (Ming) — the source of the general interpretive maxims; the Bushi Zhengzong is built on it
• Zhang Shibao, Yilin Buyi (Ming) — the Yilin general-judgement chapter and its commentary; outside the Huang Jin Ce line, and our third lineage for interpretive rules
• The Na Jia verse (Hun Tian Jia Zi) — the basis for assigning stems and branches to lines
• Guanyitang content protocol — every rule corroborated by two independent sources, or not published