The Old Master's Guide to the I Ching: A Map of Change: How the Chinese Book of Decisions Actually Works, Taught by a Working Teacher (The Old Master Series) - Softcover

Qing Wu, Old Master

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798162921233

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

Most books about the I Ching hand you sixty-four answers and wish you luck. This one teaches you how to read. Old Master Qing Wu has spent forty years teaching the Changes in market towns and teahouses, and he writes the way he talks: a hot pot of tea first, then the work. In this book he walks you through the whole apparatus — the two kinds of line, the sixty-four figures, the positions and their rules, the vocabulary of outcomes — until the book stops being a fortune-telling toy and starts being what it was built to be: a clear-eyed tool for looking at a decision you already have to make. Along the way he does what no guidebook has time for. He puts the Chinese text of every quotation on the page, line by line, with a plain-English explanation, so you can check every single thing he tells you. He shows you how a question becomes a hexagram, six throws of three coins, no apparatus needed beyond a hand. He tells you which questions this book refuses to answer — the diagnosis, the windfall, the wedding date — and why those refusals are the most honest part of the tradition. And he takes you on a tour of the whole family: two pillars and six children, thunder and wind, water and fire, mountain and lake, until all sixty-four figures stop being strangers. You will not be told what will happen to you. You will learn something more useful: how to ask. Inside:

• The complete casting method, step by step, with the worked arithmetic checked three ways
• The outcomes vocabulary (good fortune, regret, "no blame") explained without the moralizing usually bolted onto it
• A tour of all sixty-four figures as eight family doors, with maps and plates drawn for this book
• The honest history: the divining bureau with its December audits, the traveling stories, and the trade's own tricksters, reported by a man who has watched both

For readers of Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi, and anyone who has ever wanted the I Ching without the incense.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798162921233
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 204