Six Lines (Najia) divination for beginners: how it works

Six Lines divination (六爻, liuyao, also called 納甲, najia) uses the same cast as an ordinary I Ching reading but reads it in a completely different way. Instead of interpreting the Judgment and line texts, it attaches a heavenly stem and an earthly branch to every line, labels each line with one of six "relatives", and weighs those lines against the month and day on which you cast. If a text reading asks "what does the book say?", a Six Lines reading asks "which line stands for my matter, and is it strong or weak right now?"

Where it comes from

The building blocks go back to Jing Fang (京房), a Western Han scholar of the first century BCE. The commentary transmitted under his name, the Jingshi Yizhuan (京氏易傳), arranges the 64 hexagrams into eight "palaces" and assigns stems and branches to their lines — the system explained in our guide to Jing Fang's eight palaces. Over the following centuries, diviners combined this with five-phase theory and the coin cast; a Song-era manual, the Huozhulin (火珠林), is usually named as the classic of the coin-based practice.

The method as most people practise it today was fixed by two Qing manuals: the Zengshan Buyi (增刪卜易, 1690) and the Bushi Zhengzong (卜筮正宗, 1709). They disagree with each other — and with older books — on a number of finer points, which is worth knowing before you trust any single rule.

Six Lines belongs firmly to the image-and-number side of the tradition; the difference between that approach and reading the text for its meaning is the subject of image and number vs meaning and principle.

Setting up the chart

The set-up is called 裝卦, "dressing the hexagram". You start with an ordinary cast — three coins tossed six times, as described in the three-coin method — noting which lines are old yin or old yang. Then:

• Find the palace. Every hexagram belongs to one of eight palaces, named after the eight pure hexagrams. The palace gives the chart its element (Qian and Dui metal, Zhen and Xun wood, Kan water, Li fire, Gen and Kun earth).
• Mark self and other. The palace order fixes one line as 世 (shi, the self) and the line three places away as 應 (ying, the response). See the shi and ying lines.
• Attach the stems and branches. Each trigram carries a fixed set of stem-branches, one set for when it sits below and one for when it sits above. Qian below gives 甲子, 甲寅, 甲辰; Qian above gives 壬午, 壬申, 壬戌. Each branch has an element — 子 water, 寅 wood, 辰 earth, and so on (see stems and branches).
• Label the six relatives. Compare each line's element with the palace element and you get its relative: parents, siblings, offspring, wealth or officer. This is how a line comes to "stand for" money, a job, a document or a person. The full rule is in the six relatives.
• Add the six spirits. Six "spirits" (六神 — Green Dragon, Vermilion Bird, Hooked Chen, Flying Snake, White Tiger, Black Tortoise) are laid on the lines from the bottom up, starting from the one that belongs to the day's stem. They colour a line rather than decide anything.
• Note the time. Write down the month branch (月建, set by the solar terms, see the 24 solar terms), the day's stem-branch (日辰), and the two "void" branches (旬空) of the ten-day week the day falls in.

A chart, line by line

Say you cast Hexagram 44, Gou — Xun below, Qian above — in a 寅 (tiger) month on a 甲子 day. Gou is the first generation of the Qian palace, so its element is metal, the self sits on line 1 and the response on line 4. Read from the top:

• Line 6: 壬戌 earth — Parents — Black Tortoise.
• Line 5: 壬申 metal — Siblings — White Tiger.
• Line 4: 壬午 fire — Officer — Flying Snake — response.
• Line 3: 辛酉 metal — Siblings — Hooked Chen.
• Line 2: 辛亥 water — Offspring — Vermilion Bird.
• Line 1: 辛丑 earth — Parents — Green Dragon — self.

Two things stand out. First, there is no Wealth line: nothing in the hexagram is wood. Tradition then looks for a "hidden spirit" (伏神) in the palace's pure hexagram, Qian, whose second line is 甲寅 wood, Wealth — so Wealth is said to lie hidden under line 2. Second, the 甲子 day makes 戌 and 亥 void, so lines 6 and 2 are "empty" for now. And in a 寅 month wood is in season, fire is supported, water rests, metal is confined and earth is at its lowest: the metal and earth lines of this chart are not at full strength.

Reading it: the use spirit, the month and the day

With the chart set up, the reading itself turns on three questions.

• Which line is my matter? You pick the use spirit (用神) from the question: Officer for a job, Wealth for money, Parents for a document or a home, and so on. This choice is the hinge of the whole method — see the use spirit.
• Is it strong? The month branch and the day branch support, drain, control or clash each line by the five phases. A use spirit that is in season, supported by the day and not void is in good shape; one that is out of season, clashed and void is weak.
• What is moving? Moving lines act on the others, and each moving line's changed branch "turns back" to help or harm it.

The void branches come from the day: ten stems pair with twelve branches, so each ten-day week leaves two branches without a stem — the 甲子 week runs 甲子 to 癸酉 and leaves 戌 and 亥 empty. The manuals soften voidness for strong, moving or clashed lines, and schools apply those exceptions differently.

Notice what is missing: the Judgment, the line texts and the Ten Wings. A Six Lines reader may glance at the hexagram name, but the verdict comes from the elements. That is the real difference between the two practices, and it is why a Six Lines answer can sound very different from a text reading of the same cast. Both can be done from one toss of the coins; just do not mix their rules.

What our tool does and does not do

When you cast a reading, the coins are tossed by the server with a cryptographic random source, and the chart is computed from that moment: the month by the exact solar term, and the day by your own local clock, with the new day starting at 11 pm (the start of the 子 hour). Your result page shows the set-up chart beside the text reading — palace, generation, month, day, void branches, and every line's stem-branch, relative, spirit and self/response mark — so you can see the structure for yourself.

The in-depth Six Lines reading goes further. It picks the use spirit from the area of life you chose (your gender is asked only to choose it for relationship questions), scores its strength by month and day, lists hidden spirits where needed, and describes how each moving line acts on it. The rules follow the Zengshan Buyi and Bushi Zhengzong, and every rule choice is documented in the code. The prose is written by AI from those computed facts and is checked against them.

Things it deliberately does not do: there is no health category; it does not compute the hexagram body (卦身), three-branch combinations among moving lines, or the timing of when a void or broken line "comes out"; and the strength score is a documented heuristic, not a classical number. It describes conditions; it does not promise outcomes or dates.

How to start

• Cast with one clear question and choose the matching area of life.
• Before reading anything else, find the self line and the use spirit in the chart.
• Check the month and day against the use spirit's element, and note whether it is void.
• Only then read the moving lines, and keep the text reading of the same cast as a separate, second opinion.