I Ching
Unknown author
Change is inevitable. It often happens without warning or notice, an unavoidable factor in everyone's life that defies prediction. But the ancient Chinese believed differently: with three simple coins and a single book of 64 answers, one could find true divination.
The book is known as the I Ching (pronounced yee jing), more commonly known in the West as The Book of Changes. Few books - if any - command such whole-hearted devotion. The Bible might strongly recommend the way of Christian living, but to the I Ching obsessive, there is no life without the book.
The I Ching doesn't claim to solve the big questions of God and the meaning of life, but questions relating to your most pressing personal interests - such as career, relationships and health - can be forecast.
You ask a question, write it down and - in a precursor to the common heads/tails solution - throw three coins. Based on the majority result of the three coins, you then draw a line: a positive result (all or mostly heads) means a straight line; a negative result (all or mostly tails) means a broken line. You keep doing this until six straight or broken lines are stacked on top of each other to form a 'hexagram' - the book is then consulted, with one of its 64 hexagrams offering an answer to your conundrum.
The hexagrams are vague and ambiguous, more like encrypted horoscopes than definitive answers. Each is translated to a single word, such as 'correcting' or 'ascending', which can be further extrapolated into such phrases as 'work on what has been spoiled' or 'pushing upward'.