道Tao Reading道读

Entertainment and cultural study. Not medical, financial, or legal advice. Not a prediction, diagnosis, or promise of results.

2026-11-10

What the three-coin method actually fixes

How Tao Reading turns eighteen coin faces into a hexagram, and why the note afterwards is not allowed to edit it.

A three-coin cast is a small piece of arithmetic. Three coins are thrown six times. Heads counts as three, tails as two, and the sum is a line: six, seven, eight, or nine. Six and nine are the old lines, the ones that change. Seven and eight stay as they are. The bottom line is thrown first.

Those six numbers are the whole oracle. Yang lines (seven and nine) and yin lines (six and eight) become the primary hexagram. The old lines are flipped to make the resulting hexagram. Tao Reading does this in a seeded generator, so a cast can be replayed. The same seed is the same eighteen faces.

The English beside the figure is James Legge's public-domain translation of the judgment, the image, and the changing lines, plus a short gloss written for this desk. A language model may then explain the JSON of that result. It is instructed not to renumber the hexagram, and the page prints the computed figure whether or not the model is feeling poetic.

None of this is a forecast. It is a way of holding a question still long enough to read an old text against it. If you need a decision about health, money, or the law, use the institutions that exist for those decisions.