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Showing posts from February, 2013

The YiJing Oracle: An Android App for Divination

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What is the YiJing? As I mentioned in a previous entry, I Ching or YiJing , I’d present the Android app that I have been working on for the past few months. Click the link above to learn more about the kind of fortune telling or divination the app deals with. Goals Several years ago I was inspired to create an app dealing with the YiJing after learning how to use it. There were several things I wanted to accomplish with the app to make the YiJing easier and more accessible, yet insightful, to the uninitiated. Make casting the lines easier, quicker and more convenient Although casting the lines using three coins is the quickest and most convenient, splitting the yarrow is the older of the two. I enjoy the time I spend counting and splitting the stalks, but it would take more than 10 minutes to cast all the lines. In addition, if you were not careful you could miss a stalk or two and it would throw off a reading and you would have to either restart or try to see where you made

I Ching or YiJing

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I’m currently writing a soon-to-be-released app for Android devices dealing with the I Ching or YiJing . But, the friends whom I’ve talked to are unfamiliar with the YiJing. (I’ll be using YiJing instead of I Ching because YiJing is based on Pinyin , the ISO standard for transliterating Chinese.) Summary The YiJing is a book also known as The Book of Changes , The Classic of Changes or the Zhouyi (“Joe-Yee”). It is one of the oldest Chinese texts and dates from the Shang Dynasty . It contains a system of fortune telling and is primarily used to tell the future. It consists of a collection of comments on, and interpretations of, a set of 64 symbols or hexagrams consisting of six lines. Each line is either “Yin” or “Yang”, represented by broken and solid lines. The YiJing can be consulted by opening a version to a random page and reading the interpretations. But, the more common method is to randomly generate the lines that compose a hexagram. The hexagram is built from the b