Taixuanjing

The Taixuanjing is a divination guide composed by the Confucian writer Yang Xiong (53 BCE18 CE) in the decade prior to the fall of the Western Han dynasty. The first draft of this work was completed in 2 BCE; during the Jin dynasty, an otherwise unknown person named Fan Wang () salvaged the text and wrote a commentary on it, from which our text survives today.

== Content == The Taixuanjing is a divinatory text similar to, and inspired by, the I Ching. The I Ching is based on 64 binary hexagrams—characters composed of six horizontal lines, with each line either broken or unbroken. Meanwhile, the Taixuanjing is based on 81 ternary tetragrams—characters composed of four lines, with each line either unbroken, broken once, or broken twice. Like the I Ching, it may be consulted as an oracle by casting yarrow stalks or a six-faced die to generate numbers which define the lines of the tetragram, which is then looked up in the text.