About Six Lines

Six Lines is an I-Ching reference and Chinese almanac for iOS, created by Augustin Chan at Digital Rain Studios. I built it because existing tools either oversimplify the tradition or bury it under mystical aesthetics. The I-Ching deserves a serious reference tool — one grounded in classical scholarship, not pop divination.

The almanac evaluates days per-activity with transparent reasoning from the 1739 imperial Xieji Bianfang Shu (協紀辨方書) — the most rigorous editorial project in the history of Chinese date selection. I studied traditional Plum Blossom Numerology methods and the King Wen sequence to design a tool that respects the source material. Development is heavily AI-assisted, with AI used for research, translation verification, and code — but every editorial decision about the classical texts is mine.

The app includes all 64 hexagrams with original interpretive essays connecting hexagrams to classical art and literature, character-by-character Hatcher Matrix translations for deep study, and the complete Jiao Yanshou Forest of Changes (焦氏易林) — 4,096 poetic verses, each illustrated with original Chinese ink brush artwork commissioned for Six Lines.

The Liu Yao (六爻) structural analysis module provides the six-line analytical framework that professional Chinese practitioners actually use: najia branch mapping, Six Relatives, useful spirit identification, and Five Element dynamics.

Six Lines has two guides. Gua provides deep consultation grounded in classical scholarship — honest when hexagrams are severe. Yao runs entirely on your device for private line study and translation. Both follow the source texts.

I believe divination software should be contemplative, not extractive. Six Lines collects no personal data, runs core features on-device, and is designed with the same care I give to the tradition itself: Goudy Old Style typography, a warm ivory palette, and generous whitespace.