"What is above form is called Tao;
What is within form is called tool."
--Shao Yung

In 11th Century China, there was a man named Shao Yung whom was an old, eccentric philosopher who spent all his time fiddling around with the I Ching. He would paste the hexagrams on the walls of his house and sleep with them under his pillow. He became so obsessed with the I Ching that he left his job with the Emperor just to spend all his time staring at the hexagrams. But, with all this studying he just couldn’t find the answer to his most nagging question: He knew that there was a numerical structure to the Universe and he knew the subtle changes of the 64 hexagrams could make a prediction, but how was it done? The answer was hidden inside his pillow. One morning he woke up and saw a rat in his room. Shao took his ceramic pillow and threw it at the rat. The pillow cracked open and inside was a note that said: this pillow will be sold to Shao Yung who will break the pillow when he throws it at a rat at a certain time, on a certain day, on a certain month, on a certain year.

This is amazing, thought Shao, for he had just broke the ceramic pillow under the very circumstances and exact time as predicted in the note. Shao decided to track down the author of the note. This lead him to the potter who made the pillow who told him about an old man who would sit in his workroom carrying the I Ching under his arm. Then Shao went to the old man’s house only to be told by a young boy that the old man, his father, had died two days earlier. Thinking that he had come too late, Shao started to leave. But the son called him back and gave Shao a book that his father said was to be given to a scholar that would come to his house two days after his death. And that this scholar would be able to find where the money was buried to pay for his funeral. That book was the I Ching and tucked inside the pages were the formulas for prediction. With these formulas Shao was able to mathematically calculate where the old man had buried his silver to pay for the funeral expenses. After years of studying the I Ching, the formulas he had been searching for were finally in his hands.

The formulas that the old man had given Shao demonstrated that the I Ching was the mathematics of manifestation and that all our experiences could be reduced to a number and then assigned a corresponding hexagram. Combined with Shao’s own observation between the metaphysical (Tao) and the material (tool) world we now have a way to use numbers for divination.

There are two groups of formulas that I will describe. The first is The Early Heaven Formula which is based on the Ho T’u. This is the original three-line marking of the bagua invented by the legendary shaman king, Fu Hsi when he observed the patterns of nature. These broken (_ _) and unbroken (__) lines became the eight trigrams and the creation of the I Ching.

King Fu Hsi placed these patterns of lines into a map, assigned them a number, a direction and a season. 

The second formula is from The Later Heaven Sequence or, the Lo Shu. Here, the Emperor Yu took the trigrams from the Ho T’u and rearranged them in the order of the productive cycle of the Five Elements.

There are 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, which are the combinations of two trigrams, one on top of the other. To find the predictive hexagram we must first find the trigram of the situation in question and then the second trigram, combine them and see which hexagram it describes. In the Early Heaven formula we have three methods:

First, we need to find the Upper Trigram. We do this by translating a situation into a number. It can be anything: a name, an event, the number of words in a question asked, measurements, etc. at the moment we wish to make a prediction.

Next, we take the sum of the number and if it’s 8 or less, then that will be our Upper Trigram. If the sum is more than 8 then we will divide 8 into it and whatever the remainder is will be the Upper Trigram. For example: 33 divided by 8=4 with a remainder of 1(8x4=32; 33-32=1). That 1 will be trigram 1 (or, Chien).

The Lower Trigram is determined from the time period the prediction is made. We add up the hour, day, month and year and if the total is 8 or less then the corresponding trigram will be the lower trigram. However, if the sum is more than 8 then you will divide that number by 8 until you get a number 8 or lower and that will be the lower trigram (12 divided by 8=8-12=4; 4 is the trigram Chen).

The year, month, day and time is to be calculated from the Chinese calendar since the formulas are based on it, for example: the hours between 11pm and 1am is the hour of the Rat and is number 1. 9pm to 11pm are a Pig hour and is number 12. The Chinese Lunar calendar for the year 2002 starts at Feb 12th through March 13th and is the Tiger month and is also the first month. The year 2002 is 7. 

The only exception is the day of the month and that can be based on the Western calendar. The reason for this is, the calculations for the Western and Eastern “day of the month” is quite different and that I am basing my examples from Da Liu’s book "I Ching Numerology", which uses Western numbers.

An example of Formula One is from Shao Yung’s own experience: One winter evening as Shao and his son were relaxing there was a knock at the door. It was a neighbor standing outside. “What do you think he wants?” asked the son. Shao replied, “let’s predict what he wants”. The son suggested the Upper Trigram as 1, which is Chien to represent “one knock at the door”. Shao added up the month, day, year and the time of the knock and got the number 5, which is Schun and that became the Lower Trigram. Schun represents wood and something long and straight and Chien is metal and square. And since it was wintertime, Shoa immediately suggested the neighbor would ask to borrow an ax. When they opened the door, Shao and his son weren’t surprised when the neighbor asked to borrow an ax to chop wood for his fireplace.