The sixty-four
In the order of the book. Open one to read it whole.
Cast a hexagram
Six lines are cast from the bottom up, each one a six, seven, eight or nine. The reading explains the hexagram in plain words: the questions it raises, its judgement and image, every line that changes, and the figure those lines become. The old text, in James Legge's translation, is folded beneath it.
Set the lines yourself
Line 1 is the lowest. Six and nine are the lines that change.
About the cast
Legge describes the stalks in his Introduction: "Forty-nine stalks were employed, which were thrice manipulated for each line, so that it took eighteen manipulations to form a hexagram." Three counts to a line give its number: nine is the old yang and six the old yin, the lines that change; seven is the young yang and eight the young yin, which stand. The stalks give a changing line far more rarely than a steady one, six once and nine three times in sixteen, against seven five times and eight seven times, and the page casts at those odds. The whole operation is set out in the Great Appendix, and the numbers in Legge's note to Appendix V.
The three coins are a later practice and are not in the book. Each coin counts three for one face and two for the other, and the three together give the same four numbers, but at other odds: six and nine each once in eight, seven and eight each three times in eight.
"The figures having been formed, recourse was had for their interpretation to the thwan of king Wăn, and the emblematic sentences of the duke of Kâu." The reading follows that order. It starts with the judgement on the whole figure, then gives every changing line without choosing among them, since the book gives no rule for that, and ends with the figure the changing lines become. Hexagrams 1 and 2 have a seventh statement, for when all six lines change; it is shown when they do.
How to read it: the first figure is the situation as it stands. A changing line is the part of it that is moving now, and it speaks most directly to the question. The second figure is where the movement leads. With no changing lines, the first figure is the whole answer.
Sources
The plain readings are Hermetic Cloud's own, written for this page from the traditional sense of the text. The sequence and pair notes follow the book's Appendix VI, on the order of the hexagrams, and Appendix VII, on contrasted pairs. The old text is The I Ching in James Legge's translation, second edition, 1899, as the archive prints it: the Text, Appendix I and Appendix II, with Legge's names and italics. The figures are drawn from the six lines the source's own figures record for each hexagram.