Wen Wang Gua

Wen Wang Gua (文王卦)

Seed, not scripture

The source carries several versions of this framework, each with long Output: blocks and a fillable template. Read the template as a menu, not a mandate. The modules below are the moves available to you; a real reading deploys the ones the question calls for and lets the rest stay in the drawer. Mechanically filling every blank produces a worksheet, not an oracle. The whole art is knowing which three or four modules this particular cast actually wants — and improvising the connective tissue between them.

Casting

State the query with precision and emotional resonance — the question's clarity shapes the reading's clarity. Generate the hexagram by your method (coins, yarrow, or computational randomization; name the method). Document the primary hexagram, any moving lines, and the palace (卦宫) it belongs to. When running this on a conversation rather than a fresh question, you may derive lines from the chat's own structure — but say how, so the cast stays honest.

The interpretive moves (deploy what the reading wants)

• Trigram dialectic. Lower trigram (内卦) = inner reality, core resources; upper (外卦) = outer conditions, environment. The tension between them is the reading's primary theme. Often this alone answers a simple question.
• Na Jia (納甲) mapping. Assign each line its Earthly Branch (地支) and Five-Element value relative to the palace element. This is the scaffolding the Six Relatives stand on — do it when the reading needs elemental precision, skip the full table when it doesn't.
• Six Relatives (六亲). Using the palace element as Self, each line becomes: Parents (父母, what generates the palace element), Siblings (兄弟, same element), Offspring (子孙, what the palace generates), Wealth (妻财, what the palace controls), Officer/Ghost (官鬼, what controls the palace). Identify the Self line (世爻) and the Usage line (用神) — the line that actually answers this question. This is usually the heart of a WWG reading.
• Five Elements dynamics (五行生克). Who feeds whom (生), who restrains whom (克). State plainly what nourishes and what drains the Usage line — that is strength or vulnerability for the matter asked about. (For the sensory rendering of these relations, ride /elemental-phenomenology.)
• Moving lines & transformation (变爻). Each moving line is a narrative node: name the transformed hexagram and how the Six-Relatives landscape shifts — who gains, who loses, where the Self ends up.
• Line-text hermeneutics (爻辞). Where it deepens the reading, cite the classical line texts from the Zhou Yi (周易) — original characters, pinyin, a literal and an interpretive rendering. Treat them as wisdom-narrative, not fortune-cookie. (See /polyglossia for the layered-translation discipline.)
• Dramatization. Personify the Six Relatives as characters — Parents protective, Siblings rivalrous, Officer/Ghost as threat or authority, Wealth as seductive asset — and let them argue around the Self's predicament. This is where an abstract elemental chart becomes a felt situation.
• Related hexagrams. Mutual (互卦) and nuclear hexagrams for extra angles, when the primary reading leaves something unlit.
• Timing. Use branches, stems, the sexagenary cycle to indicate when. (Defer to /chronosemiology or /san-shi-diagnostic for deep temporal work.)
• Synthesis. Who helps, who harms, what to do, what to watch, when. Plain and actionable, even after baroque analysis.
• Recursion (optional). If real ambiguity remains, cast a refined secondary question and integrate. (See /recursive-divination if you have it, or just do it inline.)

How to play it

Lead with the question, not the apparatus. Choose the three-or-four modules that carry this reading and let them breathe; a tight reading on the Usage line plus one elemental dynamic plus a synthesis beats a complete-but-lifeless run through all eleven. Crown the analysis in the oracular register (/oracular-voice) so the verdict speaks in image and paradox rather than worksheet-prose.

Failure modes

• Worksheet mode. Filling every Output: block dutifully. The single most common way this dies. Cut to what answers the question.
• Apparatus before query. Burying the querent's actual concern under Na Jia tables. The branches serve the question, never the reverse.
• Sanitized verdict. Resolving oracular ambiguity into bland advice. The Yijing answers in tension and image; keep some of that alive.
• Invented classical text. If you can't recall a line text accurately, paraphrase its sense and say so. Never fabricate a citation from the Zhou Yi.

Kin in the ecology

/san-shi-diagnostic and /chronosemiology (the Chinese cosmological / qualitative-time wing). /darshana (receiving sacred text phenomenologically — natural when line texts are in play). /oracular-voice (delivery register) and /elemental-phenomenology (making 五行 visceral) are the two portables that finish almost every reading. /polyglossia for layered translation of the classical sources.

To a future instance

The original prompt's templates are gorgeous and total — and that totality is the trap. You inherited a vocabulary of moves, not a procedure to execute. The mark of having learned this skill is not running all twelve modules flawlessly; it's casting a clean reading with four of them and knowing why you left the other eight alone.