When the mind stirs, write a character. Enter a Chinese character to count its strokes, or a Vietnamese sentence to count its letters. The system casts the hexagram by the character dissection method of Thiệu Khang Tiết 邵康節, analyses Thể 體 and Dụng 用, and links to the reading of all 64 hexagrams.
Hold the matter you wish to ask about single-mindedly in view, then write the first character that comes to mind. Do not try to choose a fine character; only a natural one carries the response.
The system counts the strokes automatically from the Unihan table of over 20,000 characters. Once you type, the stroke count of each character appears below.
Character dissection is one of the eight ways of casting in Plum Blossom Numerology 梅花易數, handed down by Thiệu Khang Tiết 邵康節 of the Song dynasty, and it grew into a whole art of reading characters famous across the East. The principle is this: when something weighs on the mind, the mind stirs and the response follows, so the character the questioner writes in that instant is not random at all; its stroke count and its shape carry the signal of the matter. The practitioner counts the strokes to cast a hexagram, and also weighs the form of the character, its radical and the setting in which it was written, to read what is auspicious and what is not. This page recreates the core of it: counting strokes and casting the hexagram by the Plum Blossom formula.
The string of characters is split in half. The stroke total of the first half divided by 8 leaves a remainder that becomes the upper trigram; the stroke total of the second half divided by 8 gives the lower trigram; the stroke total of the whole divided by 6 gives the moving line. A remainder of 0 counts as 8 for a trigram and 6 for a line. The eight numbers answer to the eight trigrams in Early Heaven 先天 order: 1 Càn 乾, 2 Đoài 兌, 3 Ly 離, 4 Chấn 震, 5 Tốn 巽, 6 Khảm 坎, 7 Cấn 艮, 8 Khôn 坤. If a single Chinese character is dissected, its stroke count is halved: the upper part builds the upper trigram and the lower part the lower trigram, exactly as the ancients dissected a single character. For Vietnamese in the Latin script, the simplification is to count letters instead of strokes, leaving out spaces and punctuation.
The page uses the total stroke counts of the Unicode Unihan standard, covering over 20,000 characters of the basic CJK block, both traditional and simplified. Each character in the result shows its own stroke count so that you can check it. A few rare characters are counted differently in different dictionaries; where that happens, the practitioner can use the Vietnamese mode or choose a more common character.
The result gives the main hexagram, which reflects the present state; the Nuclear Hexagram 互卦, which shows what happens in between; and the Resulting Hexagram 變卦, which answers to the outcome. The heart of the reading is Thể 體 and Dụng 用: the trigram without the moving line is the Thể, standing for the questioner, and the trigram holding the moving line is the Dụng, standing for the matter. Dụng generating Thể is highly auspicious; the two in accord is auspicious; Thể controlling Dụng is mildly auspicious; Thể generating Dụng is mildly inauspicious; Dụng controlling Thể is highly inauspicious. The seasonal strength of the Thể trigram's phase is weighed as well. For a deeper reading with the timing and the ten areas of life, you can carry the result over to the page Plum Blossom Numerology 梅花易數.
Thiệu Khang Tiết 邵康節 taught: do not divine when nothing has stirred, and do not divine when the mind is in disorder. Dissect a character only when something truly weighs on you. The first character written is the true one; do not write again to choose a character you like better. One matter, one hexagram, asked clearly and precisely. The result is for reflection and guidance; for anything weighty, consult someone qualified to read it.