About Your I Ching

Who runs Your I Ching

Your I Ching is an independent, one-person project. It is designed, built, and operated by a solo developer, Gavin — there is no company staff, no editorial team, and no licensed “master” behind a curtain. The product exists because its builder wanted an I Ching practice that takes the question seriously: slow enough to feel like consultation, honest about the role software plays in it.

Running the site as one person cuts both ways, so the rest of this page states plainly what is automated, what is not, and what we will not fake.

About Gavin

Gavin came to the I Ching by chance, through a teacher from the Shao family. His teacher began learning the I Ching and the Huangji Jingshi from the elders of his family at the age of eight, and the family traces its line to Shao Yong (1011–1077), the Northern Song thinker who wrote the Huangji Jingshi. Gavin studied Shao Yong’s system with him, and he writes and reviews the hexagram pages on this site.

Why this site exists

Gavin built Your I Ching so that more people could understand the I Ching and actually use it — not as a curiosity, but as a way to think through a real question.

Shao Yong’s Huangji Jingshi gives every year of history a governing hexagram. Working from that calendar, we gathered the Chinese historical record for the years from 841 BCE to 1983 CE, summarized what happened in each year with the help of AI, and grouped the years under their governing hexagrams to see what each group has in common. Sixty of the sixty-four hexagrams govern years in this scheme. What those years share is what we build on when we describe a hexagram’s direction and tone.

Shao Yong applied the hexagrams to the rise and fall of whole dynasties. We believe the same patterns can also shed light on the smaller questions of a single life. We hold that as an interpretive view rather than a proven law, which is why we never quote an accuracy rate.

Direction, not fate

Every hexagram, and every changing line within it, describes the direction a situation is developing in. A direction is not a fixed outcome: the situation is still moving, and what you do next is part of it. Read this way, the I Ching is less a verdict than a reading of momentum — closer to how many Western readers already think about trends, choices, and consequences than to fatalism.

How a reading works

Every reading follows the same three steps, and the division of labor between you, the casting engine, and the AI never changes:

• You ask and you cast. You write the question in your own words, then cast the six lines yourself — six separate throws, one for each line of the hexagram. The site never casts for you in the background.
• The engine computes the hexagram. Each throw is returned at random by the casting engine (the Huangji Engine, the same upstream service named in our Privacy Policy). The engine combines the moment you cast — the captured-time hexagram — with your six throws; the AI never chooses the lines. See changing lines for how a cast can resolve to a second hexagram.
• The AI writes the interpretation. An AI model takes the cast result and your original question and writes an interpretation grounded in that specific hexagram — see the growing hexagram library for the kind of material it draws on.

What the AI does — and doesn’t

The interpretation text you receive is generated by AI, and we say so instead of dressing it up as a human sage. Just as firmly: the AI never chooses your lines. The cast is random, the hexagram follows from the cast, and the AI only interprets what the cast produced. It points to the direction a situation is moving in; it does not hand down a fixed future, and it is not a substitute for professional advice — for medical, legal, or financial decisions, consult a qualified professional. For a longer, honest discussion of what accuracy can even mean here, read our answer on accuracy.

Sources and the text

Readings are grounded in the received structure of the I Ching (Yijing): the sixty-four hexagrams of the King Wen sequence, their trigrams, and their changing lines. Interpretations are written per question rather than quoted from a single published translation. On the hexagram pages, the Chinese text is the received text, and the English is our own rendering, checked line by line against the Chinese, with James Legge’s public-domain translation (1882) as a reference point. Those pages are drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by Gavin, and each one says when it was last updated.

The only lineage we mention is Gavin’s own teacher, described above; we claim no titles or credentials beyond that.

Our promises

• Your first reading is free, without a signup wall in front of the casting. Paid options are laid out on the pricing page before any charge.
• Your question stays private. Readings are not published, not indexed, and not used as marketing content. The details live in the Privacy Policy.
• No invented numbers. No fabricated user counts, star ratings, or testimonials anywhere on the site — if a number is missing, it is because we do not have a real one yet.
• Payments are handled by our payment provider; card numbers never touch our servers. Refunds follow the Refund Policy and the Terms of Service.

Contact

The support inbox is support@youriching.com. It is read by the person who built the site — expect a reply within a few days, not minutes.