Jiao Shi Yi Lin (焦氏易林)

The Forest of Changes — 4,096 Verses, One for Every Transition

Overview

The I Ching gives you sixty-four texts. The Yilin gives you four thousand and ninety-six. Composed in the Han dynasty by Jiao Yanshou (焦延壽) — the teacher of Jing Fang, the great systematizer of hexagram divination — the Forest of Changes answers a question the older classic leaves open: when a cast produces moving lines, the hexagram you threw becomes another, and what does THAT passage mean? Jiao's answer was total: a four-character-verse omen for every one of the 64 × 64 transitions, keyed as 本卦 to 之卦 — 乾之坤, 屯之未濟, each pair its own poem. The result is the largest single oracle text of classical China, admired for two millennia as much for its verse as its divination: terse, vivid Han poetry of omens and journeys, cranes and granaries, kings and fugitives. askTIAN serves the complete corpus — all 4,096 verses verbatim from the imperial 四庫全書 edition, coverage asserted every time the engine loads — behind an authentic yarrow-stalk cast or a direct transition lookup.

Origin & history

Jiao Yanshou flourished in the first century BCE, a Liang commoner risen through study to a county magistracy, remembered by the Han histories chiefly as the man who taught Jing Fang. His method — 以一卦變六十四, one hexagram transformed into all sixty-four — founded the 卦變 school of I-Ching practice, in which meaning lives not in a hexagram alone but in the movement between two. The 四庫全書 editors, cataloguing the text among the divination classics, counted its architecture exactly: sixty-four chapters, each opening with its own hexagram unchanged (乾之乾) and then running through the other sixty-three in King Wen order, 4,096 verses in all — the very count and ordering askTIAN's parser verified chapter by chapter before a single verse was served.

The Forest of Changes survived two thousand years as both oracle and anthology — scholars from the Han onward mined it for early verse, and textual critics like Gu Yanwu probed its dating line by line. Editions accumulated variants, and askTIAN's edition-work is disclosed rather than hidden: the base text is the 文淵閣四庫全書 edition via the Kanripo transcription, cross-checked against the independent Wikisource transcription wherever both exist — verses agree verbatim or differ only by variant readings the WYG itself records as 一作 glosses. One documented misprint in the imperial edition (the 艮 chapter's 小畜 entry printed under the name 小過) is corrected by King Wen position, with the reasoning stated in the source. Glyph variants are normalized, interlinear glosses stripped, and the 提要's own arithmetic — 64 chapters × 64 entries — is enforced as a load-time assertion, not a hope.

How it works

Two modes. CAST: the engine runs the full 大衍筮法 — fifty yarrow stalks, eighteen changes, the shared engine behind iching.yarrow — producing six lines with the authentic asymmetric odds (moving yang three times likelier than moving yin). The moving lines transform the base hexagram into its derived hexagram, and the verse at 「本卦之derived」 is your answer; a cast with no moving lines reads the chapter's opening self-entry, per classical convention. Deterministic under a seed, full line-by-line audit returned. LOOKUP: pass any two King Wen numbers and read that transition directly — the building block for rendering a hexagram's entire chapter, all sixty-three of its departures plus itself. Verses arrive verbatim in the original Literal Chinese, exactly as the Han text gives them: askTIAN fabricates no translation, because the four-character imagery is the oracle, and the interpretive layer has belonged to the reader for two thousand years.

Good for

Use cases

The Second Reading

After any I-Ching cast with moving lines, one lookup call fetches the Yilin's verse for that exact transition — a second, older voice on the same throw, keyed by the pair the cast already produced.

The Full Forest Cast

One call: eighteen yarrow changes animate from the audit, the base hexagram transforms, and the transition's four-character omen lands — the complete Han-dynasty procedure in a single request.

The Chapter View

Sixty-four lookups render a hexagram's whole chapter as Jiao arranged it — the self-entry first, then every departure in King Wen order — the oracle as a readable book.

LLM-Grounded Interpretation

Feed the verbatim verse and its linkage (乾之坤) into your model as grounded context — the classical text guaranteed by the deterministic layer, modern prose added on top, never substituted.

Key terms

本卦 / 之卦
The cast hexagram and the hexagram it becomes when its moving lines transform — the PAIR that keys every Yilin verse, written 乾之坤: Qian going to Kun.
以一卦變六十四
Jiao's founding move: one hexagram transformed into all sixty-four, giving every transition its own text — 64 × 64 = 4,096 verses.
The Self-Entry
Each chapter opens with its own hexagram unchanged (乾之乾) — the verse a cast with no moving lines reads, per classical convention.
卦變 (Hexagram Change)
The school of I-Ching practice Jiao founded, locating meaning in the movement between hexagrams rather than in one alone; his student Jing Fang systematized it.
四言 Verse
The four-character line of Han poetry each omen is written in — terse, image-dense, and served verbatim: the imagery IS the oracle.
一作 Variants
The received editions record alternate readings as interlinear '一作…' glosses; askTIAN's base is the 四庫 edition, cross-checked against an independent transcription, variants disclosed rather than merged.
The 艮之小畜 Correction
One documented misprint in the imperial edition — the entry printed under the wrong name, betrayed by its King Wen position — corrected transparently, with the reasoning stated in the source.
大衍筮法 Casting
The cast mode runs the full fifty-stalk yarrow procedure (shared with iching.yarrow), so the 本卦/之卦 pair arrives with the authentic 1/16 · 5/16 · 7/16 · 3/16 line odds.

API

The askTIAN Yilin API serves the complete Forest of Changes — all 4,096 transition verses verbatim from the 四庫全書 edition via Kanripo, cross-checked against an independent transcription, coverage asserted at every engine load — behind two modes: an authentic yarrow-stalk cast (shared 大衍筮法 engine, moving lines transforming 本卦 into 之卦, self-entry convention for static casts, deterministic under seed) and a fully deterministic from/to lookup for chapter rendering. Edition variants and the one corrected misprint are disclosed in the method string. Pure compute, no LLM, 2 TIAN pay-per-call.

Endpoint: POST /trpc/yilin.consult — 2 TIAN Points. See the API documentation and Playground.