Liu Yao, or Six Lines Divination, is a traditional Chinese divination method based on I Ching hexagrams.
In this anonymized teaching case, a 21 year old man asked: Would I be able to marry my girlfriend?
My judgment was that the relationship would face serious resistance and repeated instability. Marriage would be difficult, but it was still possible, and I expected it the following year.
Here is how I broke down the casting. It was Hexagram 51, Zhen, changing to Hexagram 25, Wuwang. The top two lines were moving, and both the original and resulting hexagrams were Six Clash formations. The casting was made on June 3, 2020, during a Shen hour, between 3 and 5 p.m. local time. In the traditional calendar, this was the Gengzi year, Xinsi month, Dingchou day, and Wushen hour, with Shen and You falling into the void. I used Liu Yao, looking at the Six Relationships, the Shi line, moving lines, support from the month and day, and the void.
For a man asking about marriage, I used the Wife/Wealth line to represent his girlfriend. Wife/Wealth appeared twice, as Chen Earth and Xu Earth. I selected the moving Xu Earth line, which also held the Shi (Self) position, as the primary indicator. Wife/Wealth holding Shi showed how much he cared about her. The line also carried Qinglong, which I read here as a sign that his girlfriend was physically attractive. Xu Earth was supported by both the month and the day, so its strength initially looked favorable.
But the outer trigram repeated the same earthly branches before and after the change, creating a Fu Yin, or repeating pattern. In this case, I read Fu Yin as pain, repetition, and a situation unable to move forward. Both hexagrams were also Six Clash formations, adding another strong sign of instability. The relationship was already in crisis rather than progressing smoothly toward marriage.
The other important movement was Official/Ghost Shen Metal. Xu Earth generated Shen Metal, so the line representing the girlfriend was continually losing strength to it. Since Shi already represented the man asking the question, her current boyfriend, I read Official/Ghost here as another man connected to her. Shen Metal also carried Xuanwu, which in this relationship context suggested a private or unclear intimate connection, possibly involving cohabitation. But Shen Metal was void, so I did not read this as a relationship that was still active. It looked more like a man from whom she had already separated or divorced. The relationship had ended, but its history was still affecting the couple in the present.
If I had stopped at the Fu Yin and the two Six Clash formations, the answer would simply have been that marriage was unlikely. But there was another detail I could not ignore: Parent Zi Water carried Vermilion Bird. A Parent line can represent certificates and formal documents, while Vermilion Bird also relates to paperwork, so in this case the line pointed more specifically to a marriage certificate. The Chou Earth branch of the Dingchou day combined with Parent Zi Water. Under the timing rule used in this case, that combination showed that marriage could still take place despite the resistance. The casting was made in a Gengzi year, and the following year was Xinchou. Because Chou appeared again there, I placed the marriage in the following year.
The person later reported that in August 2020, his parents learned about the relationship and strongly opposed it because the woman was divorced and had a child. The couple split up and got back together several times. His parents eventually relented, and the couple married on October 2, 2021.
What matters in this case is that I could not stop at “no marriage” simply because both Six Clash and Fu Yin pointed toward instability. Those signs did describe the repeated conflict and resistance accurately. But the relationship between the Parent line and the day branch preserved the possibility of marriage and also helped locate its timing. The apparently conflicting signals made sense once they were read as different parts of the same real process.
Everyone is welcome to join the discussion and share how they would approach this case through different forms of divination.
If you would like to visit previous case studies, you can find earlier posts here.
Series index: Liu Yao Case Study Index
AI disclosure: English isn’t my first language, so I used AI to translate and help edit the English.
