New Project: I Ching - The Book of Change

• Consult the I Ching!
• View the source on Github!

I recently digitized the core text of the public domain Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching and made a small web app for users to throw stalks (or coins) and get a reading.

This kind of thing exists online¹, but the sites I’ve seen don’t have a meditative quality to them at all. You click a bunch of buttons and get an immediate result. It’s too fast. I wanted to make something that was easy to use, but gives more opportunity for reflection.

To that end, I used vanilla JS and CSS to walk a user through the steps and stretch the process out with simple timed element fading. It begins by prompting the user to throw sticks 6 times instead of automatically picking them at random at a single click. The idea is typically for the user to focus on their concern while they throw the stalks or coins, which can take a couple minutes to organize, interpret, and look up. The least I could do was to extend the timing a couple seconds after each digital throw to encourage a longer period of meditative focus before viewing their readings.

I purposfully omitted Wilhelm’s commentary on the hexagrams because I prefer the experience of reading the core text and encouraging more interpretation, but I wouldn’t be opposed to including that elsewhere, or on the hexagram reading itself, but hidden by default.

As a career backend engineer, I enjoyed playing around with JS/CSS. It was a fun UI exercise, and I’m definitely going to continue on it to clean up the code and add more interesting features if I can. I want to add more references and context for those who want to read further, and I can add more of the peripheral info about the trigrams and hexagrams, like familial relationships, animals, obtained images, data browsing, etc.

I used Chota CSS for its simple styling and row/col tags, but I don’t know that I love it. I ran into some weird problems where I couldn’t hide a button, so I want to understasnd more about what it’s doing under the hood, but I’ve also wanted to write my own tiny CSS framework for my own sites, so this might be a good opportunity to get the basics down.

1. A few: ichingonline.net, Eclectic Energies, AI Ching ↩